Argentina

Argentine tourism in 2100 will be the work of a smaller, older, and more arid country than the one that exists today. Under the most likely demographic trajectory, the population settles at around 38 million people, with a median age near 52 and fertility well below replacement. That profile will reshape demand long before climate finishes reshaping supply: domestic tourism pivots away from the youth-and-mass character of Mar del Plata summer holidays, Bariloche school trips and the Buenos Aires nightlife circuit toward older, higher-spending, accessibility-sensitive visitors who travel less often but expect more. International arrivals, currently around six million a year, plausibly stabilise in the eight-to-ten-million range and contribute six to eight percent of GDP, up modestly from today. Argentina is also a probable net climate-migration destination from drier neighbours — the Bolivian altiplano, the Paraguayan Chaco, northern Chile — which partially offsets fertility decline and biases the demographic envelope toward the upper end of plausible ranges.

The climate signal is unambiguous in direction and uneven in its regional pattern. By the last decades of the century, the Pampas warm two-and-a-half to four degrees Celsius above the recent baseline, the Andes warm three to five degrees with amplification at higher elevations, and Patagonia warms two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half degrees. Precipitation rises in the northeast — Misiones, Corrientes, parts of Entre Ríos — and falls across the central-western heartland and the Pampas, where Cuyo loses thirty to fifty percent of its Andean snowpack by mid-century. The January 2022 Buenos Aires heatwave, which broke a 1957 record and pushed nighttime minima above 27 degrees across the metropolitan area, becomes a typical summer event by mid-century and a near-baseline condition by 2100, fundamentally rewriting the city's calendar of urban tourism.

The Patagonian glaciers, long Argentina's most photographed natural asset, are mostly dying. The Southern Patagonian Ice Field has been losing mass at high rates since 2000, and Perito Moreno — until recently the celebrated exception, anchored on a subglacial ridge and holding near-zero net mass balance — has just entered a new regime, with frontal thinning accelerating sixteenfold and up to 800 metres of retreat along the Canal de los Témpanos in the past five years. Perito Moreno will most likely persist as a viewable but visibly diminished spectacle through 2100, while Upsala, Viedma and Spegazzini retreat to ribbon-glacier remnants confined to high cirques, and the smaller glaciers above Ushuaia and near Bariloche disappear functionally around 2070. The last-chance tourism surge therefore peaks in the 2030s and 2040s before tapering into a memory-tourism phase of digital twins, ice-museum installations and climate-witness pedagogy anchored at El Calafate and El Chaltén.

Along the Atlantic coast, the southern right whales of Peninsula Valdés persist as a tourism asset but with a different seasonal phenology and intermittent mass-mortality interruptions. The southwestern Atlantic population now exceeds five thousand individuals, and Puerto Pirámides hosts the largest whale-watching industry in Latin America, yet calf mortality has been anomalously elevated since 2003, with major die-offs already linked to harmful algal blooms producing saxitoxin and domoic acid — events whose frequency rises with sea-surface warming. Magellanic penguins at Punta Tombo, already shifting colonies northward as their prey distributions move, will most likely leave that iconic site diminished but not abandoned, with newer colonies at Tova and Punta Ninfas absorbing the growing visitor load.

Iguazú will swing between drought and flood, and the volatility is itself the threat. The 2020 drought reduced flow to thirteen percent of normal at one point; the 2014 and 2022 floods reached ten to thirty times normal flow and destroyed walkways at Garganta del Diablo. Wetter average annual flows are likely over the long run, but the dominant operational impact through the rest of the century will be variance: longer dry shoulder seasons that periodically reduce the falls to a streamy trickle, and intense convective wet events that close infrastructure outright. The most likely 2100 picture is a heavily engineered site, with predictive hydrological modelling, elevated and modular walkways, dynamic carrying-capacity pricing matched to flow conditions, and a permanent experience guarantee delivered through immersive digital reconstruction during low-flow periods. The surrounding jaguar and yacaré habitat in the Atlantic Forest persists in a more fragmented configuration, with Misiones forest cover stabilising only if recent deforestation trends are reversed.

Ushuaia, meanwhile, becomes a contested Antarctic super-gateway. Visitor numbers transiting the port for the Peninsula already exceeded 120,000 in the 2023–24 season, and a lengthening operationally viable Antarctic season combined with the 2048 review of the Madrid Protocol's mining moratorium frames the next several decades. The most likely trajectory is substantial expansion of Antarctic tourism through Ushuaia — to perhaps a quarter to four hundred thousand visitors annually by mid-century — accompanied by tightening biosecurity, mandatory shore-power for cruise vessels and AI-driven ship-routing to limit cumulative impact at peninsular landing sites. The 2048 review is unlikely to open Antarctica to extraction, but it will likely formalise a per-capita tourism cap that benefits Ushuaia by entrenching its incumbent gateway role. Tierra del Fuego National Park, the Beagle Channel, the former presidio, trout angling and king-crab gastronomy round out one of the country's most resilient tourism nodes.

In Mendoza and the Andean foothills, viticulture moves uphill and south. Malbec's bioclimatic suitability migrates from the historically dominant lower-elevation departments of Maipú and Luján de Cuyo toward the Tupungato–Tunuyán–San Carlos–Malargüe axis and into the Patagonian corridor of Río Negro and Neuquén. The lower-elevation areas largely convert to heat-tolerant Mediterranean varieties and Criolla revival lines, while wine tourism consolidates as a higher-priced, more curated, increasingly drought-narrative-driven experience, with several mid-elevation wineries reborn as viticultural heritage sites. The binding constraint is water rather than temperature: dwindling Andean snowpack has cascading implications for Mendoza city's drinking water as well as for vineyards. Aconcagua remains the icon of mountaineering tourism, though its summer climbing window contracts as freeze-line altitudes rise and rockfall hazard worsens, and the Andean ski areas — Las Leñas, Catedral, Chapelco, La Hoya, Cerro Castor — operate substantially shortened seasons and diversify into mountain biking, alpine summer amenity and amenity-migration housing.

Northern Argentina enters the most politically contested phase of its tourism history. Quebrada de Humahuaca and the Argentine segment of the Qhapaq Ñan rely on Quechua, Kolla and Aymara community participation, and these same provinces sit at the heart of the country's portion of the Lithium Triangle, holding more than half the world's known reserves. Salinas Grandes, visited annually by hundreds of thousands of cultural tourists, has been the focus of more than fifteen years of Atacama and Kolla legal resistance, and lithium brine extraction's two-million-litres-per-tonne water demand stresses basins where annual recharge is already marginal. By 2100, Salinas Grandes is most likely partially industrialised, with high-elevation indigenous communities having either negotiated revenue-sharing agreements based on free, prior and informed consent or having been substantially dispossessed. Cueva de las Manos and the Talampaya–Ischigualasto complex, environmentally more stable, become flagship deep-time destinations marketed jointly with a broader Patagonian palaeontological corridor.

Artificial intelligence is the central swing variable across all of these trajectories, and it will cut both ways. The pivot to position Argentina as a global AI hub, anchored on Patagonian data centres powered by Vaca Muerta gas and hydropower from the Limay–Neuquén system, delivers real benefits — glacier and whale now-casting, biosecurity at international gateways, digital twins of Cueva de las Manos and the Jesuit missions, predictive fire mapping for Nahuel Huapi and Los Alerces, and language preservation for Mapuzungun, Quechua and Guaraní. It will also displace thousands of guides and hospitality workers, transfer booking-fee value to the offshore parents of platform companies, and pit cooling-water demand against civilian users in already-stressed Cuyo and Neuquén basins. Compounding all of this is Argentina's chronic macroeconomic volatility and the deliberate hollowing of state planning capacity, which makes long-horizon tourism investment unusually exposed to short-term political shocks.

The picture that resolves at the end of the century is one of divergence rather than collapse. A handful of well-capitalised flagship destinations — Iguazú, Los Glaciares, Valle de Uco, central Buenos Aires, the Beagle Channel — achieve genuine carbon-intensity, biodiversity and heritage gains. The broader system, including the eleven biosphere reserves, the Chaco-Yungas ecotone, the Pampas wetlands and the indigenous-administered cultural assets of Jujuy, Salta, Chubut and Misiones, absorbs the cumulative cost of macroeconomic turbulence, deregulatory political cycles and a global tourism economy that has only partially decarbonised. Tourism survives. The question, as it has always been in Argentina, is who benefits, who is dispossessed, and which of the country's extraordinary natural and cultural assets retain enough integrity to deserve the name of sustainability.