Villa Epecuén was once the most glamorous spa destination in Argentina. Then the lake swallowed it whole. What it left behind – after 25 years beneath ten metres of salt water – is one of the most haunting landscapes on earth.
There is a photograph taken in Villa Epecuén sometime in the summer of 1980 that shows a family on holiday. A father, a mother, two children, a beach umbrella striped in the colours of the Argentine flag.
Behind them, the silver surface of Laguna Epecuén stretches to the horizon. The children are laughing. Somewhere beyond the frame, an ice cream vendor is making his rounds. The weekend trains from Buenos Aires are full. Five years later, that beach was under ten metres of water.
Villa Epecuén’s story is one of the most extraordinary in the history of tourism – not merely because of its destruction, but because of what came after it. A town that spent a quarter of a century at the bottom of a saltwater lake did not simply disappear. It waited.
And when the water finally withdrew, what it revealed was a landscape unlike anything else on earth: bleached, corroded, crystallised, and somehow still legible – a ghost city frozen in the moment of its own drowning.
This is the story of how Villa Epecuén was built, how it was lost, and what remains of it now.
The Golden Years: Argentina’s Most Glamorous Spa Town
Villa Epecuén was born from salt and ambition in the early 1920s, on the eastern shore of Laguna Epecuén in Buenos Aires Province, some 600 kilometres southwest of the capital.
The lake, whose name derives from the Mapuche language and means roughly “almost burnt”, was fed by underground springs and had, over millennia, accumulated a salt concentration roughly ten times that of the ocean.
In this it resembled the Dead Sea, and it was this comparison that an enterprising Englishman named Jorge Okecki seized upon when he leased the lakefront land and began marketing it to Buenos Aires’ wealthy classes.
The marketing was imaginative even by the standards of the era. Italian scientists were hired to certify the lake’s therapeutic properties.
Pamphlets circulated among Buenos Aires’ elite promising cures for rheumatism, skin conditions, depression, and diabetes. The waters were described as “miracle waters.”
Whether the science was rigorous is questionable; whether it worked as marketing is not. By the 1930s, Villa Epecuén was firmly established as the fashionable resort destination of the Argentine upper-middle class.
Access came by rail. The Sarmiento Railway operated a direct service from Buenos Aires to Villa Epecuén station, and the Midland Railway carried passengers to nearby Carhué.
The trains arrived full on Friday evenings and departed full on Sunday nights, carrying families, couples, and solitary convalescents who had been prescribed a course of floating in the salty shallows.
| Villa Epecuén at Its Peak ▪ Founded: 1921, on the eastern shore of Laguna Epecuén [1] ▪ Peak tourism: 25,000 visitors per summer season (November-March) [2] ▪ Accommodation: At least 5,000 visitor beds; 16 hotels, 150 lodgings [3] ▪ Businesses: Over 280, including restaurants, spas, and luxury shops [1] ▪ Permanent residents: Approximately 1,500 at peak [1] ▪ Access: Direct train service from Buenos Aires (Sarmiento Railway) [1] ▪ The lake: 10× saltier than the ocean; compared to the Dead Sea [2][4] ▪ Peak decade: 1950s-1970s – the height of Argentine prosperity and leisure culture |
By the 1960s and 1970s, Villa Epecuén had evolved far beyond a simple health resort. It had a casino, cinemas, a yacht club, luxury villas, boutiques, and restaurants serving food to rival anything in Buenos Aires.
The slaughterhouse at the town’s entrance – designed by the celebrated Art Deco architect Francisco Salamone, whose municipal buildings across Buenos Aires Province are now recognised as significant works of Argentine modernism – symbolised the town’s industrial vitality alongside its leisure culture.
Pablo Novak, who would later become the town’s last and only resident, grew up in this world. His father had arrived from Odesa, Ukraine, as a young man, travelling for two years as a stowaway to reach Argentina.
He settled in Villa Epecuén, met Pablo’s mother, and learned to make bricks – the same bricks that would eventually be found scattered across the ruins of the town their son refused to leave.
“I witnessed the birth, glory, agony, death, and resurrection of my beloved Villa Epecuén.”
– Pablo Novak, Orato World Media [3]
6 November 1985: The Slow Catastrophe
The flood that destroyed Villa Epecuén was not a tsunami. It was not a sudden, violent event that arrived without warning and was over in minutes.
It was, in many ways, more terrifying than that: a slow, relentless, unstoppable rise that gave the town’s 1,500 residents just enough time to understand what was happening, and not enough time to do anything about it.
The problems had been building since 1980, when rainfall across the region began to increase sharply. The lake, which had no natural outlet, absorbed the water year after year.
By 1985, Laguna Epecuén had swollen far beyond its normal boundaries. In 1978, recognising the danger, the Hydraulic Directorate had constructed a horseshoe-shaped embankment five metres tall to protect the town. It held for seven years.
On 6 November 1985, a seiche – a rare standing wave caused by an unusual weather pattern – created a surge that overwhelmed the dam upstream.
The dam broke. The surge reached the embankment. And the embankment, after seven years of holding back an increasingly swollen lake, gave way. The water entered the town at a rate of roughly one centimetre per hour. [4]
One centimetre per hour sounds manageable. It is not. One centimetre per hour, sustained without pause, is 24 centimetres per day. Within two weeks, the town was under three metres of water.
By 1993, it lay beneath ten metres – more than thirty feet – of salt water. The train tracks flooded within days, cutting off the last mechanical connection to the outside world. The town that had spent six decades welcoming visitors was now permanently closed.
“Hotels had already bought everything for the summer season and hired employees. The water broke in one night. A few days later, authorities told us: ‘Take what you can carry. We need to leave town. Epecuén is going to disappear.’”
– Pablo Novak [2]
There were no deaths directly attributed to the flood. The slow pace of the water gave residents time to evacuate, and the town’s 1,500 inhabitants dispersed to Carhué and other nearby towns, most expecting to return within months once the water subsided. Many never did.
Pablo Novak remembered the sounds of that night years later, in an interview: “A sense of helplessness filled the air as I heard the screams and saw the tears. The 1,500 inhabitants of Epecuén took whatever they could.”
The psychological toll on the survivors proved lasting. Many of the elderly residents, forced to abandon homes and businesses they had built over decades, never recovered emotionally from the dislocation.
The assumption that the flooding was temporary – a seasonal event that would correct itself – made the eventual permanence of the loss harder to accept.
Twenty-Five Years of Silence: What the Lake Did
For the next quarter of a century, Villa Epecuén existed in a form that had no precedent in Argentine history. It was present – the streets, the buildings, the hotels, the cars, the contents of lives interrupted mid-sentence – but invisible, buried beneath tonnes of salt water in a lake whose chemistry would prove to be both extraordinarily destructive and strangely preserving.
The high salinity of Laguna Epecuén, which had been its commercial selling point for sixty years, now became the agent of the town’s transformation.
Salt water at this concentration is not merely corrosive in the ordinary sense. It infiltrates porous materials like brick and concrete, crystallising as it evaporates and expanding with sufficient force to fracture stone from within.
It bleaches organic material. It kills vegetation by drawing moisture out of root systems. And when the water eventually withdrew, it left behind a deposit of salt crystals on every surface it had touched.
The result, revealed when the waters finally began to recede in 2009, was unlike anything the residents who returned to look had expected.
It was not simply a ruined town. It was a transformed one – everything whitened, crystallised, corroded into forms that were simultaneously recognisable and alien.
2009: The Ghost City Surfaces
The withdrawal of the water was as slow as its arrival had been. In the early 2000s, a shift in regional climate patterns brought drier seasons to the area.
The lake, without replenishment and with no outlet, began to evaporate. By 2009, the water level had dropped sufficiently to expose the upper parts of the town, and the process of revelation began.
What emerged was described by journalists, photographers, and the handful of former residents who returned to look as post-apocalyptic – a word that is frequently overused in travel writing, but which here seems entirely adequate.
The landscape of Villa Epecuén is unlike anything produced by ordinary abandonment or ordinary decay.
| The White City: What Salt Water Left Behind ▪ Trees: Dead, white, skeletal – salt crystallised on every branch and twig ▪ Buildings: Walls standing but hollowed; brickwork encrusted with salt crystals ▪ Cars: Rusted chassis visible through accumulated salt deposits; tyres long dissolved ▪ Furniture: Iron bed frames, tables, and chairs – corroded but still recognisable in shape ▪ Hotels: Façades standing; interiors gutted by water pressure and 25 years of immersion ▪ Streets: Visible but broken; kerbs and cobblestones displaced by water movement ▪ The slaughterhouse: Designed by Art Deco architect Francisco Salamone; one of the few structures still largely intact – now the most photographed building in the town [5] ▪ Hotel signs: Still legible in places, the names of establishments that have not opened in 40 years |
The photographs taken by Argentine and international photojournalists in the years after the water withdrew became some of the most widely shared images in the early history of social media.
The combination of the white skeleton trees, the crystallised ruins, and the flat, hyper-reflective surface of the remaining water created images that looked artificial – like concept art for a film about the end of the world – but were entirely real.
The Atlantic’s photo essay of 2011, featuring the work of multiple photographers, introduced the ruins to an international audience and began the slow process of Villa Epecuén’s transformation from forgotten disaster to global dark tourism destination.
Pablo Novak: The Man Who Never Really Left
Among the 1,500 people who evacuated Villa Epecuén in November 1985, one did not stay away. Pablo Novak – born in 1930, the son of a Ukrainian immigrant bricklayer, a man who had spent his entire life in the town and whose own handiwork was embedded in many of its buildings – returned in 2009 when the waters receded enough to make habitation possible, and settled in what remained of his house.
His house had no electricity. Its furniture was rusted. The walls were encrusted with salt. His wife, who had relocated with him to a neighbouring town during the flooding years, did not wish to return; she remained in Carhué, and Pablo returned alone. He was 79 years old.
What followed became one of the most documented solitary existences in modern Argentine life. Novak rode his bicycle through the ruined streets, greeting the tourists and photographers who increasingly made the trip to Epecuén.
He drank mate on the remains of his porch. He told stories. He became, in the municipality’s formal recognition, the Cultural and Tourist Ambassador of the district of Adolfo Alsina.
Books were written about him. A documentary film – Pablo’s Villa, directed in 2013 – won international awards and brought his story to audiences far beyond Argentina. [1][3]
“As long as I can walk and tell the story of my life, I will stay here in my Ranchito.”
– Pablo Novak, Dark Tourists [6]
Novak’s explanation for why he returned was never complicated. He had grown up here. His father’s bricks were in these walls. His memories were in these streets.
The town that visitors saw as a ruin was, to him, still his town – the same streets, the same view of the lake, the same light in the evening. Everything that mattered to him was here. Everything that had happened to him had happened here.
“I grew up and lived here all my life. I saw the town born, and I saw it die.”
– Pablo Novak, FindAGrave Memorial [7]
In 2022, speaking to the Argentine newspaper La Nación at the age of 92, he said: “If I have to die, I want it to be in Epecuén.”
He got his wish. Pablo Novak died in Villa Epecuén on 22 January 2024, at the age of 93. With his death, Villa Epecuén was officially declared a deserted village – a place with no permanent inhabitants for the first time in over a century. [1]
Visiting Villa Epecuén Today: A Guide for the Dark Tourist
Villa Epecuén has, in the years since its emergence from the water, become one of the most photographed abandoned places in South America and one of Argentina’s most unusual tourist destinations.
The visitors who come are not the same as those who arrived by train in the 1960s – they are photographers, history enthusiasts, dark tourism aficionados, and travellers drawn by images that seem almost impossible.
The site is open to visitors and managed by the local authorities. Entry is free, though hiring a local guide from Carhué is strongly recommended: the layout of the town is disorienting without context, and the guides – several of whom have personal connections to the pre-flood history of the village – add a human dimension that photographs cannot provide.
| Practical Information for Visitors ▪ Location: 7 km north of Carhué, Buenos Aires Province; 530 km from Buenos Aires [3] ▪ Getting there: Daily coaches from Retiro terminal, Buenos Aires, to Carhué (Operators: General Belgrano Pullman – gralbelgrano.com.ar; Chevallier – nuevachevallier.com) [6] ▪ From Carhué: Booked tour, taxi, or local operator to the ghost town ▪ Entry fee: Free – site managed by local municipality ▪ Best time: Morning for photography (light on the white structures); avoid summer midday heat ▪ What to see: Salamone slaughterhouse • White skeleton trees • Hotel ruins • Submerged streets • Rusted vehicles • Lake shoreline ▪ Accommodation: Carhué offers hotels and thermal spa facilities ▪ Photography: Permitted; drone use subject to local regulations |
The most photographed structure in the town is the Salamone slaughterhouse at the entrance – an Art Deco building of remarkable ambition for a small agricultural town, now salt-stained and partially open to the sky, but still structurally recognisable.
Beyond it, the white trees are the defining image of the place: dead for forty years, their trunks and branches encrusted in salt crystals, they stand in groups across the landscape like witnesses to something they cannot explain.
A small ecological beach resort has been inaugurated near the shore, powered by solar panels – an acknowledgement that the lake’s waters, even in their diminished state, retain their therapeutic qualities.
Carhué, the nearest town, has rebuilt its own reputation as a spa destination, transporting mineral water from Laguna Epecuén to hotels that offer the same floating experience that drew visitors to Villa Epecuén a century ago.
Why Villa Epecuén Is Unlike Any Other Abandoned Place
The world has no shortage of abandoned towns. Pripyat, evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, is perhaps the most famous.
Kolmanskop in Namibia, a diamond-mining settlement swallowed by desert sand. Craco in southern Italy, perched on a ridge above the valley that finally defeated it. Each has its own particular character, its own specific form of desertion.
Villa Epecuén occupies a category of its own, for several reasons. First, the water. No other abandoned town of comparable scale has spent 25 years submerged under saltwater of this concentration.
The visual result – the white crystalline coating on every surface, the bleached trees, the corroded metal – is unlike anything produced by ordinary abandonment or ordinary decay. It looks, to the human eye, more like a natural phenomenon than a human settlement. The distinction between the man-made and the natural has been dissolved.
Second, the timeline. Most abandoned places are simply left. Villa Epecuén was actively hidden – buried under ten metres of opaque water – and then revealed.
The experience of seeing it is therefore not merely the experience of visiting a ruin. It is the experience of seeing something that was concealed and has now been uncovered. There is an archaeological dimension to it that ordinary abandonment does not provide.
Third, and perhaps most powerfully: Pablo Novak. Every abandoned place is, in a sense, a story about people who left. Villa Epecuén was also a story about a man who refused to.
His presence – and now his absence, since his death in January 2024 – gave the ruins a human scale that photographs of empty buildings cannot provide. He was the thread connecting the golden years of the 1960s to the salt-bleached landscape of the present.
Now that thread is broken, and the town is, for the first time in its history, truly empty.
“Photos of Epecuén fascinate the world not for its miraculous waters and beauty, as in the past, but for its history and the remains of its ruins.”
– Pablo Novak [3]
Epilogue: What Remains
Villa Epecuén is now, officially, a deserted village. Its last resident is gone. The trains that brought families from Buenos Aires no longer run. The hotels are open to the sky. The casino’s machines are somewhere at the bottom of a lake.
And yet the place is not empty in any meaningful sense. The visitors who come – hundreds of thousands in recent years, drawn by photographs that look like the work of a special-effects team rather than of nature – bring something with them that the water could not dissolve.
The questions they ask. The silence they observe. The photographs they take of white trees and rusted beds and hotel signs that advertise rooms that no longer exist.
Somewhere beneath the remaining water, the deeper streets of Villa Epecuén are still there. The objects that people left in their hurry. The summer season supplies that the hotels had already purchased, as Pablo Novak remembered, before the water came.
The Argentine Atlantis did not entirely rise. Part of it is still down there, waiting.
Sources & Further Reading
[1] Wikipedia – Villa Epecuén (full historical and technical record). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Epecu%C3%A9n
[2] The Culture Trip – Villa Epecuén: Argentina’s Underwater Town That Drowned. theculturetrip.com
[3] Orato World Media – Town submerged underwater for a quarter century, man lives alone amongst its ruins (Pablo Novak’s first-person account). orato.world/2022/10/28/town-submerged-underwater-for-a-quarter-century-man-lives-alone-amongst-its-ruins
[4] Rethinking the Future – Lost in Time: Villa Epecuén, Argentina. re-thinkingthefuture.com
[5] Islands.com – Argentina’s Once-Thriving Chic Resort Town Is Now an Eerie Abandoned Village. islands.com/1870141
[6] Dark Tourists – The Ruins of Villa Epecuén, Argentina: A Resort Town Submerged (includes practical visitor information). darktourists.com/the-ruins-of-villa-epecuen-argentina-a-resort-town-submerged
[7] FindAGrave – Pablo Novak (1930–2024): Memorial and biographical record. findagrave.com/memorial/263287101/pablo-novak
[8] LADbible – ‘World’s loneliest man’ lives in empty ghost town that vanished under water for 25 years. ladbible.com/news/world-news/pablo-novak
[9] Slate / Atlas Obscura – Villa Epecuén in Argentina is a former resort village turned flooded ghost town. slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/06/17
[10] Inhabitat – Take a virtual tour of an Argentinian ghost town with its last remaining resident. inhabitat.com
[11] The Atlantic – The Ruins of Villa Epecuén (photo essay, 2011). theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/07/the-ruins-of-villa-epecuen/100110
