Glacier Panorama

Parque Nacional Los Glaciares (Spanish: The Glaciers) is a national park in the Santa Cruz Province, in Argentine Patagonia. It comprises an area of 4459 km². In 1981 it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

The national park, created in 1937, is the second largest in Argentina. Its name refers to the giant ice cap in the Andes range that feeds 47 large glaciers, of which only 13 flow towards the Atlantic Ocean. The ice cap is the largest outside of Antarctica and Greenland. In other parts of the world, glaciers start at a height of at least 2,500 meters above mean sea level, but due to the size of the ice cap, these glaciers begin at only 1,500m, sliding down to 200m AMSL, eroding the surface of the mountains that support them.

Patagonia is a region located at the southern end of South America, shared by Argentina and Chile. The region comprises the southern section of the Andes mountains to the southwest towards the Pacific ocean and from the east of the mountain range to the valleys it follows the Colorado River south towards Carmen de Patagones in the Atlantic Ocean. To the west, it includes the territory of Valdivia through Tierra del Fuego archipelago.

The name Patagonia comes from the word patagón used by Magellan in 1520 to describe the native people that his expedition thought to be giants. It is now believed the Patagons were actually Tehuelches with an average height of 180 cm (~5′11″) compared to the 155 cm (~5′1″) average for Europeans of the time.

The Argentine portion of Patagonia includes the provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut and Santa Cruz, as well as the eastern portion of Tierra del Fuego archipelago and the southernmost department of Buenos Aires province: Patagones. The Argentine politico-economic Patagonic Region includes the Province of La Pampa.

The Southern Patagonian Ice Field (Spanish: Hielos Continentales or Campo de Hielo Sur), located at the Southern Patagonic Andes between Argentina and Chile, is the world's second largest contiguous extrapolar ice field. It is the bigger of two remnant parts of the Patagonian Ice Sheet, which covered all of southern Chile during the Last glacial period, locally called the Llanquihue glaciation.

Perito Moreno National Park (Spanish: Parque Nacional Perito Moreno) is a national park in Argentina. It is located in the western region of Santa Cruz Province on the border with Chile. It has an area of 115,000 hectares of mountains and valleys at a height of 900 metres above sea level.

Argentina ⁱ/ˌɑrdʒənˈtiːnə/, officially the Argentine Republic (Spanish: República Argentina [reˈpuβlika aɾxenˈtina]), is the second largest country in both South America and the Latin America region.

The country is a federation of 23 provinces and the autonomous city of Buenos Aires, its capital and largest city. It is the eighth-largest country in the world by land area and the largest among Spanish-speaking nations by geographical area of 2,780,400 km2 and is the fourth by population, with over 41 million people. Argentina is a founding member of the United Nations, Mercosur, the Union of South American Nations, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the World Bank Group and the World Trade Organization, and is one of the G-15 and G-20 major economies.

Southern Cone (Spanish: Cono Sur, Portuguese: Cone Sul) is a geographic region composed of the southernmost areas of South America, south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Although geographically this includes Southern and part of Southeast (São Paulo) of Brazil, in terms of political geography the Southern cone has traditionally comprised Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In the narrowest sense, it only covers Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, bounded on the north by the states of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, on the west by the Pacific Ocean, and south to the junction between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, which it is the closest continental area of Antarctica (1000 km).

High life expectancy, the highest Human Development Index of Latin America, high Standard of living, significant participation in the global markets and the emerging economy of its members make the Southern Cone the most prosperous macro-region in South America.