What the Sosneado Ruins Actually Are

Most people on Day 5 clock the ruins before they ask about them — a scatter of stone walls and empty pool basins sitting at 2,180 metres, well past where you'd expect to find the remains of a hotel. The short answer is that it was exactly that: a hotel, built in 1938 by a subsidiary of one of the era's railway hospitality companies, chasing the same thing bringing you up there — sulfur hot springs running down off the Overo volcano.

It opened in December 1938 with the kind of marketing push you'd expect for a destination hotel of the period, and for about fifteen years it worked as intended: a remote thermal retreat, reachable only by a long approach into the high Andes, offering a soak the altitude made feel earned. It didn't survive the 1950s. By 1953 the hotel had been abandoned; a caretaker or two lingered a while longer, and then no one did.

Why the walk still matters to people who've never heard of it

The ruins would likely be a footnote on a map if not for what sits about twenty kilometres further into the mountains. On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in this same range — the flight and its aftermath became one of the most retold survival stories of the twentieth century, most recently through the film Society of the Snow. The old hotel's ruins have become the practical staging point for the multi-day trek to that crash site, which several hundred people still make every year.

It's a strange kind of layering — a failed hotel, abandoned for being too remote, that ended up mattering more because of how remote it was.

Andean Reach doesn't run the full crash-site trek — it's a serious multi-day undertaking on its own — but Day 5 brings you to the Sosneado ruins themselves as part of the Río Atuel Superior stage, alongside the thermal springs that gave the place its name in the first place. You get the history and the hot water; the deeper trek is its own trip, for another time.