Patagonia Before the World Found It

Fly Fishing the Argentina of Yesteryear with Legendary Guide, Jorge Trucco

Patagonia fly fishing today brings to mind legendary trout rivers, beautiful lodges, drift boats and anglers traveling halfway around the world to fish Argentina. But when Jorge Trucco began exploring the rivers of northern Patagonia, there were no fishing lodges, no professional guide culture and virtually nobody floating the rivers. In this episode of the Destination Angler Podcast, Jorge takes us back to the beginning—and tells the remarkable story of how Argentina became one of the great fly-fishing destinations on earth.

Listen to the full episode

Before Patagonia Was a Fly-Fishing Destination

Picture northern Patagonia in the 1970s.  The Andes rise in the distance. Clear rivers wind through ranch country and wide-open valleys. Brown and rainbow trout live in water that, in some cases, has barely been touched by a fly fisherman.  And there is no guide waiting at the boat ramp.  Actually, there probably isn’t a boat ramp.

“There were no guides,” Jorge told me. “There were no lodges... nobody floated any river.”

That may be the hardest thing for a modern angler to imagine. Today, we can pull up Patagonia on our phones, compare lodges, look at satellite images and book a week of guided fishing in a few minutes. Jorge was wandering into a place where the playbook hadn’t been written yet.

Then a trip to the United States changed everything.

The Wyoming Trip That Changed Patagonia Fly Fishing

In 1979, Jorge traveled north with his business partner, Jorge Donovan. They already operated the first fly shop in Buenos Aires, but what Jorge saw in Wyoming gave him an entirely new vision.

He watched guides floating the Snake River around Jackson Hole. He studied the way they handled boats, instructed clients and made decisions on the water. Then, while fishing the Green River near Pinedale, he took the oars himself for the first time.  Something clicked.

Jorge looked at what was happening in Wyoming and realized Patagonia had the rivers—and the trout—to do something similar.  “There’s a huge opportunity here,” he remembers thinking, “but nobody’s doing any of it.”

When he returned to Argentina, there wasn’t a catalog where he could simply order the perfect Patagonia fishing raft. So he found a young engineer outside Buenos Aires who agreed to build one.  Soon they were floating water that anglers had previously only approached from shore.  And then things got interesting.

Jorge remembers trout that had essentially never been pressured. Find a rising fish, throw something as simple as a yellow Humpy over it, and chances were pretty good the fish was going to eat it.  That part alone makes me want a time machine.

Ten-Pound Trout and Salmon in Patagonia?

Some of Jorge’s stories sound almost exaggerated until you realize he was actually there.

On the Chimehuín, he remembers fish over ten pounds. The Traful held big browns and landlocked salmon. And that led us down one of my favorite rabbit holes of the conversation: How did trout and salmon get to Argentina in the first place?

The answer goes back to a government stocking effort beginning in the early 1900s. Fish eggs were shipped from overseas, routed through England because refrigerated transportation was available on ships involved in the Argentine beef trade, then eventually transported south toward Patagonia. Sometimes the eggs began hatching before reaching their intended destination, and fish were placed into whatever suitable water was available along the way.

It’s a crazy bit of fly-fishing history—and Jorge tells it much better than I just did.

The Rivers Nearly Lost to Dams

But Jorge’s Patagonia story isn’t only about discovering great fishing.

At one point, proposed hydroelectric projects threatened some of the most famous waters in the region—the Chimehuín, Malleo, Aluminé, Collón Curá and Traful among them. Jorge immersed himself in the issue, spoke publicly about the projects and helped organize opposition.  Think about that for a second. Rivers that today are names fly anglers dream about could have looked very different. 

The same conservation instinct drove Jorge’s push for catch-and-release. His approach was pragmatic: don’t try to change everything overnight. Start with one stretch where the regulation could work, prove it, and then expand from there. The upper Malleo became that testing ground, with catch-and-release regulations established in 1985.

And Jorge wasn’t interested in making exceptions—even for powerful people.  There’s a great story in the episode involving Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, a cooler intended to carry trout back to the president of Argentina, and Jorge essentially saying: Not on my river.

I’m not giving away the rest.

Lefty Kreh, Movie Stars and a Lifetime on the Water

Eventually, the names coming to fish with Jorge became almost as remarkable as the rivers themselves.  Lefty Kreh. Robert Duvall. Michael Keaton. Liam Neeson. Greg LeMond. Paul Volcker. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.

But one of my favorite Lefty stories isn’t about catching some enormous trout. Jorge had studied old film of Lefty casting so carefully that he essentially taught himself to imitate Lefty’s stroke. Years later, Lefty saw him cast and asked why Jorge was casting the way Lefty used to cast—because Lefty had already changed his technique.  That’s Jorge Trucco in a nutshell: always watching, always learning, always adapting.

Listen to Jorge Trucco’s Patagonia Story

This episode isn’t really about looking backward.  It’s about how a destination gets created—and what happens when a handful of people recognize something special before everybody else does.

Jorge Trucco watched Patagonia evolve from virtually unexplored trout water into an international fly-fishing destination. He helped introduce floating these rivers, developed a guiding culture, fought to protect the resource and spent decades fishing with some fascinating characters along the way.   And at an age when plenty of people would be content telling stories about the old days, Jorge is still at it.

You’ll hear those stories—and quite a few more on this episode of the Destination Angler Podcast.

Listen to the full episode with Jorge Trucco and come with us to the legendary trout waters of northern Patagonia, Argentina.