Nahuel Huapi Lake — Nahuelito

OVERVIEW

Nahuelito is a lake monster said to live in Nahuel Huapi Lake in Patagonia. Like Nessie it is named after its lake, and it has been described as a giant serpent, a great hump or a plesiosaur; its existence has never been confirmed, despite searches and occasional photographs and videos of doubtful origin in the regional press.

HISTORY

From 1897 Dr Clemente Onelli, director of the Buenos Aires Zoo, received scattered reports of a strange creature in the Patagonian lakes. The first recorded sighting is George Garret's in 1910: about 400 m away, a creature showing 5–7 m of its length and standing some 2 m out of the water; he made it public only in 1922, in the Toronto Globe. That year the American gold prospector Martin Sheffield told Onelli of large tracks on the shore and a huge animal in the lake, and Onelli sent an expedition led by the zoo's superintendent José Chiagi, with hunters and dynamite. The Animal Protection Association objected and asked the Minister of the Interior to revoke the permit; the expedition went ahead and came back with nothing, and the story reached Scientific American. The 'captured plesiosaur' reported from Bariloche soon after was a joke: the businessman Primo Capraro's carnival float, photographed by Rafael Soriani.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The Argentine Navy is said to have chased an unidentified underwater object in the lake for 18 days in 1960. In 1988 photographs taken near the Bariloche shore were published in a magazine of the newspaper Río Negro, with an anonymous note: 'It is not a log of whimsical shapes. It is not a wave. Nahuelito showed his face.' Sightings have grown with Bariloche's tourism, as at Loch Ness, without any conclusive image.

VISITING

The lake is open water beside the city of Bariloche.