The following day, I am bound for the rain forest in the company of Alejandro Rosales, a multilingual outfitter whose company, Extremo Sur, is putting Bariloche back on the adrenaline map. Together with some wisecracking Russians, a pair of Spaniards, and my Argentinian wife, we take on the white water of the Rio Manso—which translates as "mellow river" but whose Class IV rapids turn out to be anything but. Rosales pioneered white-water sports in Argentina. "When I started this in 1991, I had to explain to the travel agents what rafting was," he says. And until a dirt track was hacked through the forest in 2000, his customers had to trudge back on foot for two hours, soaked through and ravenous. These days, provisions are more easily obtained at Extremo Sur, even though the cordero patagonico (the signature barbecued lamb) must, as ever, be roasted slowly on a spit for several hours. Served to us on communal hot plates, it's the kind of flavorful, satisfying dish that makes me abandon my notebook after the first bite.

Wilderness in high style has been Bariloche's motto since its glory years, although ever since the native Mapuches were resettled by the military in the nineteenth century to make way for the European colonists, the region has been suffering an acute identity crisis. For some Argentines, it has come to represent the idealized notion of a white, sophisticated First World society—and for others, something altogether more sinister. Following World War II, Argentina became a notorious refuge for fugitive Nazis and, according to archival material only recently made available, their vast, laundered riches passed through the hands of everyone from the Peróns, to Swiss banks, to the Vatican. Beyond Buenos Aires, their principal asylum was the Lakes, where Gestapo leader Adolf Eichmann fled and was later abducted by Mossad agents before being hanged in Israel in 1962. As recently as 1995 Erich Priebke, the director of Bariloche's German Argentinian School, was extradited to Italy and subsequently convicted of crimes against humanity.

Bariloche's commercial muscle has been threatened by its shadowy ethnic history and by multiple installments of Latin drama. In the '70s, as Argentina slipped deeper into recession, corruption, and military repression, the government-owned Llao Llao started to lose money—a result of extending one too many crony comps, as the hotel's concierge Roberto Lennon puts it. Then in 1978, amid the country's so-called Dirty War, in which tens of thousands of Argentines were killed or "disappeared," the hotel closed. The dark years of the '80s—which saw a brutal military dictatorship, a disastrous invasion of the Falklands, civil unrest, and hyperinflation—desiccated Lakes tourism. Four-star properties, starved for business, became two-star fleapits. Desperate to survive, Bariloche recast itself as a cheapo summer escape for high schoolers, while grown-ups were baited by dreary mass-market packages.