Las Grutas is a beach resort town located in the Argentine

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 province

Provinces of Argentina

Argentina is subdivided into twenty-three provinces and one autonomous city...

 of Río Negro

Río Negro Province

Río Negro is a province of Argentina, located at the northern edge of Patagonia. Neighboring provinces are from the south clockwise Chubut, Neuquén, Mendoza, La Pampa and Buenos Aires. To the east lies the Atlantic Ocean.Its capital is Viedma...

, in the department

Departments of Argentina

Departments form the second level of administrative division in the provinces of Argentina. There are no departments in the city of Buenos Aires, which has so far been divided into neighbourhoods as its administrative divisions, but is to be divided now into communes by a recently passed local act...

 of San Antonio, with a stable population of 3,500 inhabitant.s

It's located 15 kilometers southern of San Antonio Oeste

San Antonio Oeste

San Antonio Oeste is a port city in the Argentine province of Río Negro, and head of the department of San Antonio.The town is bordered by its sister communities of San Antonio Este, to the east, and Las Grutas, to the southwest. Discovered by an expedition of the Spanish Empire in 1779, San Matías...

, and is visited by over 250,000 tourist every summer. Its beaches are known for having relatively warm waters in spite of their location in the Patagonia

Patagonia

Patagonia is a region located in Argentina and Chile, integrating the southernmost section of the Andes mountains to the southwest towards the Pacific ocean and from the east of the cordillera to the valleys it follows south through Colorado River towards Carmen de Patagones in the Atlantic Ocean...

, due to the wide tidal

Tide

Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the moon and the sun and the rotation of the Earth....

 amplitude, and the protection of the San Matías Gulf. The town was founded in 1964, mainly as a group of campings, and soon began growing. But it was not until the 1980s that tourism industry finally exploded, with the construction of numerous hotels and a provincial casino.
Las Grutas', meaning "The Caves" in Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, comes from the caves created by the erosion of the sea on the cliffs that separate the city from the beach. The access to the beaches is therefore restricted to the existing 12 descends or "bajadas".
Their names, from north to south, are "3 de febrero", "Los acantilados", "A.C.A.", "La rueda", "Cero", "Primera", "Segunda", "Tercera", "Cuarta", "Quinta", "Sexta" y "Séptima", the last seven named from first to seventh.

The first accesses where the ones named "Primera", "Segunda", and "Tercera" (first, second and third), to which new ones were added as the town, and the number of visitors grew.

Near the "Cero" access there are pools artificially carved in the stone that change their water in every tidal cycle. When the tide is low, the water in the pools is quickly warmed by the sun. In colder days, old people and children sometimes prefer to make use of the pools instead of the sea.

External links

• Official site (Spanish)
• Las Grutas at Patagonia-Argentina.com
• Las grutas at MercoTour.com (Spanish)