Location: 202 mi (325 km) Northeast of San Juan Map
Area: 603.7 km2 (233 sq mi)
Info: 25 de Mayo y Las Heras, San Juan
(02646) 491 100
Open: museum & park:
Apr- Sep 9am- 4pm
Oct- Mar: 8am- 5pm
The Provincial Park of Ischigualasto or Valle de la Luna, is located
in Argentina, in the northeast of the province of San Juan and
borders the province of La Rioja to the north. It is located 324 km
from the city of San Juan by road and 124 km from the Valle Fértil
department (also known as Villa San Agustín del Valle Fértil). Its
altitude with respect to sea level varies between 1,200 and 1,800
meters in the highest peaks. It is a protected area of 275,369 ha
and famous scientifically, since it protects an important
paleontological reserve. It is the only place in the world where the
entire Triassic period can be seen totally uncovered and perfectly
differentiated in a complete and orderly manner. It is estimated
that the geological formations of this site are between 200 and 250
million years old, a characteristic that it shares with the
Talampaya National Park, with which it borders to the west because
it is located in the province of La Rioja.
Ischigualasto
Provincial Park can be accessed through the scenic route: RN 150.
The park offers a strange landscape, which is why it is commonly
called Valle de la Luna. It is characterized by scarce vegetation
and the most varied range of colors in its soils. The capricious
forms of its mountains make this place the choice of national and
foreign tourists. Although it is a scientific place, it can be
explored on a guided tour by a specialist in private vehicles.
During the tour of this traditional circuit, which takes
approximately three hours, the visitor knows geoforms such as the
Mushroom, the Submarine, the Bocce Court and Valle Pintado. In
addition, those interested can access the Dr. William Sill Site
Museum which is located at the base. This is an interpretation
center that presents the scientific work that is carried out there
for the knowledge and protection of the fossiliferous riches that
make the Ischigualasto Provincial Park a World Heritage Site.
Within the Park is the Cerro Morado, an ancient chimney of an
extinct volcano. You can climb it by hiring a guide at the base of
the park and get a privileged view. The ascent time is approximately
1 hour.
The name "Valle de la Luna" was mentioned for the
first time in a report written by San Juan journalist Rogelio Díaz
Costa and in photographs by Antonio Lago, both from Diario de Cuyo,
on June 3, 1958. Years later it began to to be known and visited
when in March 1967 the photographer Antonio Legarreta and the
journalist Federico B. Kirbus published an illustrated article in
the rotogravure of La Prensa with the title «Richness and natural
beauty of the Valley of the Moon», where the name was attributed to
Victorino de Jesús Herrera, from the family that owns the great
"Estancia Ischigualasto".
This natural provincial park was
created in 1971 by Law 3666, and was declared a National Historic
Site, in the typology of "Archaeological, paleontological and
ecological site", by Decree No. 712 of 1995, in conjunction with the
Site Talampaya of the Province of La Rioja. Said Decree assigns an
area of 62,916 hectares. It was later declared a World Heritage
Site by UNESCO on November 29, 2000.
Ischigualasto is a name of Diaguita origin, which means "place where life does not exist" or "place of death". Other versions indicate that the name means "place where the moon sets".
The climate is dry continental with extreme temperatures in summer
and winter, with great thermal amplitude between day and night.
Summer is very hot and sunny. The maximum temperature can exceed
50°C in the sun. In winter it is very cold and the minimum reaches 7
or 9°C below zero.
The rains are scarce (150 mm per year) but
when they do occur, they are torrential and often accompanied by
hail. It rains in the summer from November to March. The wind blows
throughout the year and the Zonda wind can blow strongly between
July and October.
Location and access
Ischigualasto is
located in the south of the American continent, within South
America, in the extreme southwest, approximately in the central west
of Argentina, within the province of San Juan, in the extreme
northeast of it, in the north of the Valle Fértil department. The
interpretation center and park facilities are located at the
location: 30°09′48″S 67°50′32″W.
It is located 273 km
northeast of the City of San Juan, following National Route 40 and
then following the section of National Route 150 inaugurated in
October 2014, which connects the town of Huaco with Valle de la
Luna.
Passing through Villa San Agustín, the distance from
the City of San Juan to Valle de la Luna is 330 km, and is accessed
through National Route 20 first, then by National 141, then by
Provincial 510 and by last for the National 150.
Due to the large deposits rich in fossils that the
Ischigualasto area has, this place has attracted the interest of
geologists and paleontologists since the 1930s, when some geologists
arrived to carry out studies on this site. In 1941, the Argentine
geologist Joaquín Frenguelli (or Joaquim Frenguelli), doing his
geological survey in the San Juan area, found his first fossil, a
cynodont skull that was investigated by the Argentine paleontologist
Ángel Cabrera, at the University of La Plata, on whose work the
first publication was made in 1944, this being the first research
work on the Ischigualasto fossils. Since then, several
paleontologists have searched in this place for answers about the
origin of modern dinosaurs and mammals. In 1958, the Bernardino
Rivadavia Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires entered into an
agreement with Harvard University, in the United States, to study
and classify the species found in this large paleontological site.
Those responsible were Guillermo Del Corro, for the Argentine
museum, and Alfred Romer, for Harvard, who extracted approximately
one hundred specimens in perfect condition, which were taken to the
United States for their corresponding study. Later, only part of the
pieces returned to Argentina. According to the report of the
National Commission of Museums, Monuments and Historical Places of
the Ministry of Culture, Romer wrote: "Every paleontologist dreams
of one day finding a virgin site covered with skulls and skeletons.
This dream is almost never realized. For our wonder and happiness,
the dream came true in Ischigualasto".
With the creation of
the "Ischigualasto Autarchic Entity" the Government of the Province
of San Juan took the initiative to keep intact the nomination
conferred to the Ischigualasto Natural Park by UNESCO as a Natural
Heritage Site of Humanity in the month of November 2000 for its
value geological and paleontological, as well as for its exceptional
scientific interest,18 in addition to putting into practice an
ambitious project to put all its attributes into tourist value.
This new stage for the Ischigualasto Park is communicationally
based on two fundamental axes, an experiential axis and another of
tourism-science assessment.
The experiential axis
It
includes the Valle de la Luna as a traditional tourist product,
which highlights its extraordinary landscape, including the
iconographic and distinctive use of geoforms. On the other hand, the
inclusion of another sub-axis is also considered, the natural and
cultural one, which includes the valuation of the protected native
flora and fauna and all the pre- and post-Hispanic cultural evidence
found within the limits of the Park and its buffer zone. It has 5
different tourist routes: The most extensive is the traditional
daytime circuit, which has an extension of 40 km, and a duration of
approximately 3 hours, which must be done in your own vehicle and
with a guide; the short circuit that extends for 31 km and must also
be carried out in mobility and with a guide; the full moon circuit
that takes place only 4 times a month and requires mobility and
hiking; the trekking circuit to Cerro Morado that is done in hiking;
and the Mountain Bike circuit.
The science-tourism axis
It
revalues the Ischigualasto Park as one of the most important
Triassic geological-paleontological sites in the world. This axis is
naturally divided into its two most relevant aspects: the
paleontological and the geological. The first emphasizes the
evolutionary importance, exquisite quality, quantity and variety of
vertebrate fossils that Ischigualasto has provided to the scientific
community in the last forty years. The geological sub-axis
highlights the more than 200 km² of rock outcrops that constitute a
unique uninterrupted sequence documenting the Earth's geological,
biological and climatic history throughout the Triassic period.
These conceptual baselines allow outlining future actions
regarding tourism services. The tourist use of the science-tourism
axis makes available to visitors an Ischigualasto that has normally
remained hidden and only available to the interested scientific
community. To make more than forty years of scientific research
accessible to the general public, an exhibition of almost 700
covered m² has been set up in which the complete story of a fossil
is told, from its discovery to its preparation in special
laboratories, although Above all, a great variety of the best
fossils collected in Ischigualasto are exhibited.
Very soon a project of "scientific" excursions, both
geological and paleontological, will be implemented. In these
excursions, visitors will be able to learn about 45 million years of
geological evolution of the entire Ischigualasto basin, including visits
to fossil extraction sites accompanied by specialized university guides.
All this development program includes other measures, among which
stand out: an investment plan for the substantial improvement in
infrastructure, a protection plan that includes the approval of a
Management Plan for the Park and the creation of a professional body of
park rangers, a tourism promotion plan, an analysis of the micro-region
that allows better use of the large surrounding tourist flow by the
inhabitants of the localities surrounding the Park.
Conservation
The authorities, in order to preserve the heritage and be able to use it
for tourism without causing its deterioration, have established a
management plan whose pillars are the care of the heritage, the
development of the host communities as well as the tourist activity.
Conservation planning has been required since the law creating the
park in 1971, but it was only in 2000 that the first actions were
adopted. The first planned phase covers the period 2005 to 2010, and
among other aspects it considered the limits of its surface, the
exploitation of mining resources, stratigraphy and paleontological
resources, the periods represented in the park, among others.
Museum
The exhibition of the Museum of Natural Sciences of the
Ischigualasto Park aims to show the paleontological aspects of
Ischigualasto, which are not shown to tourists during their internal
visit to the circuit. This exhibition fills a great void that existed in
that aspect, since tourists can appreciate the paleontological value of
Ischigualasto, and that is ultimately what motivated UNESCO to declare
this park a World Heritage Site.
In this exhibition, the
paleontological task is described as a continuous process from the
search for fossils in the field, through different preparation and
research tasks, to the preparation of the montages to be exhibited to
the public, as the final product of the long paleontological task.
When the exhibition is toured, the exciting world of paleontology
surrounds the tourist. At all times the visitors are accompanied by a
specialized guide, generally young students of the Geology and Biology
careers of the National University of San Juan, who will instruct them
and help them understand the different stations within the sample. The
guides will tell about their experiences on how the search and
extraction of a fossil is carried out in the field, they will also
describe some laboratory processes such as fossil preparations and
assembling plastic skeletons.
The sample also includes the
exhibition of two of the most important pieces collected in
Ischigualasto.
One of them is the Eoraptor, a very primitive
dinosaur found in 1991 by Ricardo Martínez, from the Museum of Natural
Sciences.
The Museum of Natural Sciences also has a traveling
exhibition. "Titans of Ischigualasto" is the largest dinosaur exhibit in
South America. It was exhibited in Japan, Taiwan and Chile, and in
cities in Argentina such as Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata.
paleontological taxa
dinosaurs
Herrerasaurus
Eoraptor
panphagia
Lessemsaurus
Pisanosaurus
sanjuansaurus
Eodromaeus
Pseudosuchians
Saurosuchus
Stagonolepis
Fasolasuchus
Venaticosuchus
sillosuchus
Pseudohesperosuchus
Proterochampsa
Mammalian reptiles/Mammaliaformes or Synapsida
Ischigualastia
exaeretodon
probelesodon
Ecteninion
chiniquodon
Pseudotherium argentinus (Wallace, 2019)
Others
Hyperodapedon
Marasuchus
promastodonsaurus
And the skull and claw of Herrerasaurus, which is
another dinosaur that lived together with Eoraptor at the beginning of
what later became the "Age of Dinosaurs", both are the oldest known
dinosaurs in the world so far and constitute the jewels of the Museum of
Natural Sciences of San Juan. These specimens are exhibited together for
the first time in Ischigualasto, the same place that housed them for 230
million years.
Within the exhibition you will also be able to
observe two spectacular skeleton mounts, one is that of Herrerasaurus
and the other corresponds to a Frenguellisaurus. The tourist will also
be able to appreciate several fossil skeletons within the tour that
constitute striking findings due to their type of preservation, these
give rise to the guide to introduce the tourist into scientific
paleontology, which includes, in addition to the classic studies of
anatomy and kinship relations, new disciplines such as biomechanics,
which includes the analysis of animal movements, that is, how they moved
and ran, how they hunted, what they ate, etc. On the other hand, the
results of taphonomic analysis are taught, commonly known as forensic
paleontology applications, and with them it is an attempt to understand
the causes of death, the preservation and the sum of all the processes
that the animals suffered from when they died until they were Fossils
found millions of years later.
Talampaya and Tarjados Formations: they are present in
the westernmost sector of the Ischigualasto Park and to the east, along
the Talampaya Park in the province of La Rioja. It is a set of
brownish-red rocks. The strata that make it up are mainly sandstones
(cemented sands) alternating with some conglomerate levels (coarser
sands with fragments up to several centimeters) that represent the
sediments left by the alluvial fans as they descend from the edges of
the basin. The age of this group of strata corresponds to the Lower
Triassic and up to now no vertebrate fossils have been found.
Chañares Formation: it is present in the province of San Juan in the
southwest of the Ischigualasto Park, in contact with the Talampaya and
Tarjados Formations and to the southwest in the Talampaya Park in the
province of La Rioja. It is a package of gray and whitish rocks, made up
of sandstone and clay left by the rivers that flowed into Lake
Ischichuca. They are carriers of an important fauna of vertebrates that
represent the Middle Triassic.
Ischichuca Formation: It is
present to the northeast of the park, in contact with the eastern edge
of the Talampaya and Tarjados Formations. It is a unit made up of a
succession of thin black levels of claystone and fine sandstone in which
plant remains, coal levels and lacustrine invertebrates have been found,
deposited throughout the existence of Lake Ischichuca in the Middle
Triassic.
Los Rastros Formation: outcrops from north to south,
east of the Chañares and Ischichuca Formations. It is formed by a
package of brown sandstones that alternate with black levels of clay and
coal that represent the last vestiges of Lake Ischichuca and the
sediments left by the rivers that drained into it. Numerous plant
remains, tetrapod footprints and a large number of invertebrates of
lacustrine habits from the Middle Triassic have been found in this unit.
Ischigualasto Formation: outcrops from north to south in contact
with the eastern edge of the Los Rastros Formation. It is constituted by
a package of gray, whitish and purple rocks, characterized by an
alternation of sandstones that constitute the paleoríos with fine
sediments of the plain. The largest number of vertebrate fossils in the
Ischigualasto basin have been found in this formation, in addition to a
copious collection of plant remains of leaves and fossil trunks from the
Upper Triassic.
Los Colorados Formation: this unit appears at the
eastern end of the Ischigualasto Park in the province of San Juan,
running through the entire basin from north to south in contact with the
eastern edge of the Ischigualasto Formation. It is made up of a package
of sandstone interspersed with fine levels of claystone deposited by
rivers and some dunes left by the wind. This package characterized by
its red color is the carrier of the remains of the youngest vertebrates
of the Triassic, as well as some large trunks.
Flora and fauna
The flora of the park is scarce and
characteristic of the ecoregion of mount. Large areas absolutely lack
vegetation cover. Among the species with the greatest presence are the
sampa (Atriplex lampa), the jarillas (Larrea cuneifolia and Larrea
divaricata), the false jarilla (Zuccagnia punctata), the chica
(Ramorinoa girolae), the "manca foals" or rosetilla (Plectrocarpa
tetracantha ), the purslane (Halophytum ameghinoi), the Quisco cactus
(Echinopsis leucantha), the chilca (Baccharis salicifolia), the
Cortadera (Cortaderia selloana) and the fique (Portulaca grandiflora).
Among the shrubs, the tolilla (Fabiana punensis) stands out.
The
park's fauna includes guanacos (Lama guanicoe), gray foxes (Lycalopex
gymnocercus), maras (Dolichotis patagonum), rat snakes (Philodryas
trilineata), Chaco lizards (Liolaemus chacoensis), gekos (Homonota
fasciata) and tortoises (Chelonoidis chilensis). .
Among the
birds, specimens of the rhea (Rhea americana), choique (Rhea pennata),
raptors such as the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus), the crowned eagle
(Buteogallus coronatus) and the common harrier (Geranoaetus polyosoma)
have been observed, in addition to several species of passerines, a
widely represented order.
Movie set
In 1981, the Argentine
film Vision of a Murderer, directed by Hugo Reynaldo Mattar, was filmed
there.