Every day of the year, Atilio’s home is open to throngs of hikers seeking a warm meal, mate, and a place to the rest their heads. Refugio Cajón del Azul is set against the startling beauty of the Andean Comarca of the 42nd Parallel, a mountainous area west of El Bolsón and Lago Puelo that has become of one Argentina’s most treasured wilderness sanctuaries.

In recent years Buenos Aires, and indeed the rest of Argentina, has been experiencing a development boom. It has in fact been described by property developer John Boyle as the largest in the nation’s history.

But it is the regularity with which ambitious projects seem to be left unfinished that grabs the attention of so many. Dramatic empty buildings with no windows or doors and roads that stop in mid air… All can be seen in Argentina’s capital and all lead to one big question: How is this possible?

During the early hours of 8th February 2007, a fire ravaged Villa Cartón, a shantytown built under a motorway flyover in the neighbourhood of Villa Soldati, in the south of Buenos Aires. Nearly 400 families’ homes were destroyed, and 170 people were treated for asphyxia, minor cuts and light burns.

A year on, despite government pledges, little has been done to improve the living situation of the country’s most poor and vulnerable, and the housing deficit is bigger than ever.

On the corner of Plaza and Olzabal in Buenos Aires there is a park hedged on two sides by the exposed brickwork of the adjoining buildings. It’s midday, overcast, and a light breeze is shaking the park’s only tree. Otherwise nothing, no one. Except for a diminutive little man standing on a crate, running a pole up and down a wall.

Meet Blu, one of the most innovative artists working on the streets today.

That’s the problem with small towns: the lack of choice. The long, enthralling drive from Salta had left us peckish, but a lack of options meant we had to wait for the curiously named ‘Los 3 Chinos’ restaurant to open at who-knows-what hour. No choice but to watch the handful of village kids spill onto the dirt football pitch. No choice but to watch lightning flash innocuously above the vast mountains. No choice but to place our beer on the jagged mud wall and amble onto the arena for a kick of the ball.

‘Patagonia’s most present characteristic is its endless expanse of nothingness, both an attraction and a lesson in boredom for the overland traveller’, I read as the plane veered its course towards El Calafate.

Having found a direct flight out of Ushuaia for the same price as a 2-day bus/ weather-dependent ferry/bus/overnight stop in ‘wind-pummelled service town’/bus option, I had, happily, forfeited the first leg of the Ruta 40 that starts in Río Gallegos.

During October and November 1947, 1,500 indigenous people from the Pilagá tribe were killed in a campaign that started near the town of Las Lomitas and spread throughout the province of Formosa.

Despite the discovery of mass graves more than two years ago, the Argentine government is still refusing to recognize the genocide, and ‘official’ history taught in schools makes no mention of the fact that half of the aboriginal race was wiped out in under a month.

When the economy minister Martin Lousteau announced a new regime of export taxes for agricultural products, he should have anticipated some grumblings in the countryside.

What he probably didn’t envisage was Argentina’s longest ever farming strike, the severing of the country’s main transport arteries, and the noisy return of cacerolas (saucepans) to protests on the streets of Buenos Aires for the first time since economic collapse in 2001-2.

While most people head to Punta del Este, Punta del Diablo, or Cabo Polonio those adventurous few who are not deterred by unreliable bus companies and useless park rangers head to the blue waters and soft rolling dunes of Santa Teresa, in the Rocha province in Uruguay. Each summer visitors are drawn to its beaches and the park’s other main attraction, it’s namesake.

Nestled in a river valley with the granite peaks of Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitzroy looming in the distance, the Patagonian village of El Chaltén has quickly become one of the most sought-after spots in the region. Yet despite it’s recent surge in popularity, El Chaltén remains pristine – an idyllic counterpoint to its bustling, more tourist-centred cousins like El Calafate and Bariloche.