As we eat, Marcos explains how his grandfather Aurelio Pagarde settled here in 1939, working for the nascent parks service; how he wound up naming most of the island's hills, pathways, beaches, and lagoons; how he came to host such visitors as President Eisenhower and the Shah of Iran. Yet what Marcos keeps coming back to is the simplicity of island life—growing up without modern comforts, living off the deer he hunted with his father. His mother tended a vegetable plot and made jam from fruit picked in the orchard. The family would only venture back to the mainland for monthly provisions and the occasional medical emergency—such as when Marcos accidentally hacked off his brother's finger while chopping wood. Surrendering to the idea that a secondary school might come in handy for young Marcos, the family migrated to Bariloche for ten years. But despite the town's enchanting hinterland, it had people—as well as shops, houses, cars, and restaurants. And it wasn't home.

"We came back to Victoria every weekend," says Marcos. And what did he yearn for most? Without missing a beat he replies, "La tranquilidad."

Maintaining tranquillity is the classic conundrum now facing the Lakes at large. For one perfectly dreamy afternoon we sailed Nahuel Huapi on a state-of-the-art ketch called La Bonita. Though horrendously overpriced, the excursion revealed the lake to be free of any other vessel as far as the eye could see. And for two days we holed up at Aldebaran, a spectacular new boutique property at the end of a dirt track on the San Pedro Peninsula, which is just fourteen miles from Bariloche but feels like a backwoods outpost—parts of the area are still without gas, and even the hotel itself was awaiting a phone line during my stay. "Alabama in the 1800s," as Aldebaran's owner chose to describe it.

Marred by meteoric growth and myopic town planning, Bariloche itself, however, has long passed the point of no return—a victim of its own success among big-city escapees. Nowadays, Argentina's smart set is retreating to the exclusive enclave of Villa La Angostura, on Nahuel Huapi's northern shore. Since the fifty-mile route from Bariloche was paved a decade ago, La Angostura has seen a proliferation of luxury lakeside hotels and cabanas. Martin Zorreguieta, brother of Princess Maxima of the Netherlands, recently opened a fusion bistro here. And the fact that Ted Turner as well as Planet Hollywood honcho Joe Lewis have moved in hasn't hurt property values either. Yet the population remains but a tenth of Bariloche's. In addition, new construction is controlled by strict architectural codes stipulating substantial timber usage, and the town center—rendered largely in cypress—retains a toy-village touch, as if Willy Wonka's desires had turned to wood instead of chocolate.

La Angostura's principal attraction is its natural history: Bathed in the lush greenery of the transition zone, it stands at the threshold of two elysian experiences. One is the Ruta de los Siete Lagos (Seven Lakes Route), a partially paved road snaking northward from Lake Nahuel Huapi, along a pearl necklace of smaller lakes, to San Martin de los Andes. The second is Los Arrayanes National Park—the island park within Nahuel Huapi National Park—which can be reached only by the isthmus extending from Villa La Angostura's southern fringe, and which harbors the world's only forest of arrayán (myrtle) trees.