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First opened in 1985, Kau Tapen has been improved every year by the Carreraas family, who enjoy a loyal and almost fanatical clientele. At the foremost list of the world's best fishing lodges, Kau Tapen boasts spacious guest rooms in addition to convivial living and bar areas where guests will find elegant refuge from the out of doors.

This award winning lodge offers amenities such as massage, sauna and a steam room and drying rooms for wet gear. An acclaimed chef and house staff are experienced and anxious to serve. Fine Argentine wines are chosen to compliment each meal and menus will delight even the most discriminating palette. Nothing could be more fitting than to successfully seek the rarest and most prized of anadromous fish--the giant sea-run brown trout--while enjoying a week of the "good life" that somehow belies your occupying the southernmost

fishing lodge on earth. Reminiscent of the best salmon lodges on other grand rivers, Kau-Tapen, or "fishing house" in the native Ona Indian tongue, continues to hold great promise. The fishing here for sea-run brown trout is the very best the world has to offer, period. Tierra del Fuego itself is an awesome and beautiful land, and the view from the comfort of Kau-Tapen is of grasslands that roll and sweep across unbroken terrain, halted only by the jagged spires of the Andes that separate Argentina from Chile sevral miles upriver.

The Fishing

Unlike some anadromous fish, the sea-run brown trout tend to ascend the river in small schools, not in one or two large defined runs, so the fishing is productive throughout the season. In recent years, early weeks have typically produced 175 or so trout to 6 rods; on the high side, 400-600 to 8 or 12 rods. However, it should be noted that, like steelhead or Atlantic salmon, these are anadromous fish, and cycles of weather and conditions at sea still affect fishing productivity. Several days of hard rain could make the river unfishable, but it heals itself very quickly, usually overnight.