Brummell, October 2007

Foolishly, I promised my mother I’d call her to let her know I’d arrived safely at Estancia Los Potreros, a 2,400-hectare cattle ranch in Argentina’s Córdoba province. Finding my phone had no signal, I asked my host Robin Begg, an Anglo-Argentine whose family has owned Los Potreros for generations, how I might make a call.

“Oh,” he said, unruffled, “the landline doesn’t work and there’s no signal for mobiles here. But if we saddle up a couple of horses and ride to the top of that hill over there – ” he waved airily into the distance, over the rolling hills of golden tussock grass –“we may be able to get a connection.”

Before any riding took place, however, we ate lunch on the terrace. Adjacent was the house Begg had renovated to accommodate guests who go to ride, play polo, or just swim and watch the birds. The food here is local and home-cooked. The gauchos serve great barbecues of steak, sausage and chicken grilled on an old plough wheel over an open fire; the wine bottles bear Los Potreros’ own label, and even the breakfast marmalade is made using a bitter orange that grows just down the road.

I hadn’t ridden a horse since I was 10 years old, but before I arrived Begg had promised to teach me the basics in a week. So, that first afternoon, I rode out with him across the hills to make my call. In the days that followed we watched the gauchos round up wild yearlings, rode across the high plains to bathe in a waterfall and then, at the end of the first week, Begg introduced me to the polo field. My horse, Pepino, was a tolerant creature and between us we scored a slow and inelegant goal. I was ecstatic.

The founder of the next estancia at which I stayed spent much of his life in the saddle, too, as he travelled from his home at Dos Talas, two hours’ drive south of Buenos Aires, around the pampas towns, attending to his business interests. Originally a penniless Basque immigrant, Pedro Luro was a tremendous worker: in 1847 a local landowner offered to pay him a fixed fee for every tree Luro planted on his estate. When the landowner returned home from a five-year visit to Europe, he found Luro had planted so many trees that his fee was greater than the land’s worth. And so the landowner wrote over the deeds.

Current owner Sara de Elizalde, whose husband Luis is a direct descendant of Pedro Luro, showed me to my room. “This is the founder’s bed,” she said, pointing to the rather narrow double, where, between business trips, Luuro had found the time to sire a brood of 14 children. The most extraordinary elements of Dos Talas were not created by Luro, though, but by his children, who dedicated themselves to spending his fortune. His daughter Agustina commissioned French landscape architect Charles Thays to design a park, rose garden and maze at Dos Talas; she even ordered the construction of a chapel modelled on the French cathedral Notre Dame de Passy. “I went to Paris once and I was astonished to find a statue in the Louvre that is just like one in our garden,” Sara shared with me over a farewell barbecue lunch enjoyed in the shade of Charles Thays’ trees.

From there, I continued my journey south, to the lake district of northern Patagonia where Jane Williams runs Estancia Huechahue, a working cattle ranch that also hosts riding holidays. To be frank, the complimentary pot of five hundred ibuprofen I found in my bathroom bothered me. “We ride hard here. People find they need them,” Jane explained.

My riding technique had improved considerably by this point, and with my fellow guests I helped to round up the cattle on horseback, separated the cows from their calves, then watched the male calves being castrated. (I fainted.) Later in the day, we rode out across the estancia’s lands to a cliff top where condors nested. In the evening light, around 30 of these mighty birds soared and dived, swooped and spun while, behind, the sky turned inky blue above the snow-smattered hills.

The following day we drove to Lanín National Park, where we spent three days riding and camping beneath the stars. We passed prodigious bushes of blazing scarlet notros flowers, and cantered through forests of monkey-puzzle trees. Around the horses’ hooves, wild strawberries clustered. Then, after night fell, the gauchos cooked supper over an open fire, sang traditional songs to a guitar accompaniment and, beneath the dark Patagonian skies, we danced the night away.