"The big travel companies all sold this one bus tour that took forty people around the lakes for a day while some guy made jokes on the microphone," says Hebe Cafaterra, of Lihue Expeditions, an upscale Buenos Aires agency. "And that was your only option." More critically, by the '90s, the Argentine peso was pegged one-to-one with the U.S. dollar, so for visitors Patagonia meant only Chile, while well-off Argentines found it more economical to take luxury vacations in Miami or Madrid, Rome or Paris.

But then, in fits and starts, young, independent outfitters from Buenos Aires began to fashion San Carlos de Bariloche into the nation's adventure playground. And after a fifteen-year sleep—in which weeds sprouted in the city's abandoned, looted interiors—the grande dame of the area reopened under private ownership as Llao Llao Hotel & Resort. With the peso's dramatic devaluation at the close of 2001, the money flowed into the Lake District once again.

"Argentina, it's complex," says Franco Lachetti, the Italian proprietor of Hosteria Isla Victoria. "It's like a beautiful tree—so many branches, all these different people braving the elements together. And when the wind comes and the tree falls, the roots grow back." Lachetti should know: His brainchild is at the core of the rebirth of the Lakes.

Built in 1946, Hosteria Isla Victoria swiftly rose to prominence as Argentina's ultimate honeymoon retreat: a super-exclusive seven-room lodge enfolded by the waters of Lake Nahuel Huapi. But in 1982, it went the way of Llao Llao and was completely consumed in a blaze—except that Victoria's phoenix took twenty years to rise. The scorched ruins lay derelict for a full decade; then began the nightmare of reconstruction, a three-way tussle over Victoria between the national park and the bordering provinces of Neuquén and Rio Negro. But what nearly sank the project entirely was the accidental death of the chief architect—Franco's eldest son.

As I make my approach via a half-hour boat shuttle from Llao Llao, I peer up at the wooden lodge on a sheer bluff and am overtaken by a sort of childlike euphoria. Isla Victoria is an emerald sliver of land half the size of Manhattan, swathed in virgin forest and permanently occupied by only five working families. This means that for the next three days, I will have a twelve-mile-long island wilderness all to myself—but for the few residents, my wife, a dozen other guests, and about nine hundred deer.

Once in our lakefront room, I gaze out at a horizon of receding blues and greens. But for the faraway lights of Llao Llao, it could be a re-created earth stripped of all civilization.

Third-generation islander Marcos Pagarde is our equestrian guide. He saddles up the horses and leads us through canopied pathways of coihue, alerce, and ponderosa pine. The woods beckon the horseback traveler to a multisensory experience: The inimitable whiff of the equine commingles with the perfume of calafate berries; the creak of towering timber competes with the mating squawk of the pudu (the world's smallest deer); dappled midday sun dances through leaves while we and our horses scuff past thorny rosa mosqueta bushes. Eventually, we emerge into a clearing that fans out toward a secluded bay, and awaiting us is another guide, Hernán, with a platter of smoked trout, eggplant salad, and cold cuts including wild boar.