Nahuel Huapi is a glacial lake of 529 square kilometres in the Argentine Andes, and from the shore you never see more than a piece of it. Seven long arms of cold blue water run back into the mountains between forested ridges, with the town of Bariloche on the southern edge. The shape resolves on Cerro Campanario, a chairlift hill above the lake road. From the platform, Lago Perito Moreno lies directly below, the Llao Llao and San Pedro peninsulas push out into the water, Isla Victoria sits beyond them, and the white cone of Tronador closes the west. What you are looking at is a system rather than a stretch of shoreline. Down at the pebble coves you look into the water instead of across it. At Playa Bonita the meltwater is clear enough to count pale stones several metres out, and far too cold to stay in; the colour comes straight off the ice above.
The Circuito Chico, the loop west of town, is worth doing for three or four places rather than the driving. Punto Panorámico puts Lago Moreno beneath you, with the Llao Llao peninsula out on the water beyond. Further round, Bahía López sits under the bare walls of Cerro López. At the far end Villa Tacul holds the loop's most sheltered water, its shallows going copper late in the day. Behind the town, Cerro Catedral is a ski mountain in winter and a trailhead in summer. From it you climb half a day through southern beech to Laguna Toncek. It is a glassy tarn with a refugio on the shore, ringed by granite needles that climbers cross the continent for. All of this was given away. Francisco Moreno was granted this land in 1902 for the survey that fixed the border with Chile, and the next year he handed most of it back. Nearly everything in the frame from Campanario is land one man was told he could keep.