Hunting and fishing in Argentina: red stag, Córdoba dove, golden dorado and Patagonian trout

Bush hunting for red stag in La Pampa, five hundred miles from Buenos Aires. Our partner has sent clients to this outfitter for twenty years and rates them on service as much as on success, which on stag runs at or near a hundred per cent.

Seasons are inverted from home — their March is our September. March through May is prime, with the roar peaking from the middle of March into April, and hunting stays good into late June.

The same operation runs properties from La Pampa toward Buenos Aires and down into Patagonia, so the ground can be matched to what you want to take.

Neuquén is the heart of Argentina’s mountain hunting — valleys and creeks in high desert and forest, eleven hundred miles south of Buenos Aires. Red deer were introduced here from Europe in 1911 and spread through the cordillera.

Hunting is done from 4x4 and on horseback, and it is more physical than the bush hunting further north. It is also the most beautiful country of any of these.

It sits in the same part of Patagonia as Bariloche, so it pairs naturally with a journey that already goes to the lakes.

A single ranch of roughly thirty-seven thousand acres, about two thirds of it bush with no cattle allowed on it. Stag density is high enough that from mid-March into mid-April you can move from one roaring animal to the next.

Trophy quality has climbed year on year. Clients now routinely pass twelve and fourteen point stags waiting for something between eighteen and twenty-two.

Blackbuck, water buffalo and boar are on the same ground if you want more than one species.

Red stag, blackbuck, axis, fallow, mouflon, boar and water buffalo, on ground that has been kept under low hunting pressure since 2000 and is released as only a handful of spots each season.

The draw here is combining it with high-volume wingshooting — big game in the middle of the day, then a few hundred doves morning and evening, without moving lodges.

March and April, so it does not mean waiting for autumn at home.

The Paraná Delta and the Río de la Plata break into a maze of channels and backwaters that starts less than an hour from Buenos Aires. Golden dorado are violent takers — fast, airborne, and hard on tackle.

You can fish it from a lodge or from a mothership that moves with the fish through the season and puts you on the water that is holding them.

Of everything here this is the easiest to add to a journey, because it is on the doorstep of a city you are already spending days in.

The Paraná is one of the great dorado rivers on the continent — rocky outcrops, submerged ledges, shifting sandbars and deep channels, which is exactly the structure the fish hunt.

The lodge runs all year, with the peak from November through March.

A working family estancia of more than fifteen thousand acres in the Cordillera del Viento, with access to three private rivers, spring creeks and freestone streams that see very little pressure.

Wild rainbow, brown and brook trout in cold clear water — technical dry fly, nymphing and streamer work depending on the day. The lodge is small and unhurried.

This is northern Patagonia, the same region as Bariloche, so it sits well against the Patagonian leg of a journey.

Lake Strobel is called Jurassic Lake for the size its rainbows reach — superior genetics, fast growth and a lake full of food. Stillwater fishing, stalking fish in clear water.

There are lodges on the north and south sides. The northern one controls the whole of the Barrancoso River, the only tributary flowing directly into the lake, and from October to December and again in March and April the river stacks up with fish.