When porteños need to escape the city smog, they head to Cariló, Argentina’s ‘green sand dune’ (its meaning in the Mapuche language). Breezy and easy to get to, Cariló is a top Argentina travel destination and the country’s most exclusive summer resort, a green lung which is a small slice of paradise: a pine forest next to the beach.

A stone’s throw (360km) south of Buenos Aires, a tenacious young land owner, Héctor Manuel Guerrero, made it his mission in 1917 to improve on 1,700 hectares of ever-shifting dunes which encompassed his inherited Dos Montes ranch. Thirty years later, he had accomplished that challenge: after using the estancia as a giant nursery, Guerrero had created a fledgling forest with more than 700,000 plants and trees.

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