In The Whispering Land Gerald Durrell described the peninsula and the narrow isthmus which joins it to mainland Argentina as “a cul-de-sac into which all the wildlife of Chubut had drained and from which it could not escape” and his words couldn’t be more apt. It’s a spearhead of some 360,000 hectares, which juts into the Atlantic Ocean in the province of Chubut in southern Argentina where both marine and animal life abound.

It’s a fairly barren-looking landscape but in the surrounding waters for several months each year is the jewel in its crown, the magnificent Southern Right Whale which comes here to mate and calve. In the Golfo Nuevo just off the tiny coastal village of Puerto Pirámides, you can take any one of a number of boats, from which you can observe these gentle marine giants frolic in the bay. Peninsula Valdes is one of the only places in the world where it is possible to practice professional whale watching.

Orcas also swim off the shores. They come here to feed on young seal pups born in January and February. In order to do so they have to strand themselves in calmer waters before and after high tide, a rare phenomenon only observed here and at Crozet Island in the South Seas. Besides these two great whale species, the peninsula is also a breeding ground for southern elephant seals and sea lions. And there are Magellanic penguins and dusky dolphins, too. On the peninsula itself Patagonian wildlife is plentiful in the form the guanaco (belonging to the camelid family), the smaller ostrich-like rhea, the inquisitive armadillo and the large Patagonian hare not to mention a multitude of birdlife.

Peninsula Valdes was designated a World Heritage Site in 1999 largely because of the presence of the right whales, which themselves were declared a National Monument by Argentina in the 1980s. Ironically, it was here in the 19th-early-20th centuries where whaling ships would gather to hunt the right whale for its blubber and they did so almost to the point of extinction.