A Robot Submarine Goes Looking for 'Nahuelito' at the Site of Bariloche's Latest Lake Sighting
A century after a Buenos Aires zoo director went hunting for a 'plesiosaur' in Lake Nahuel Huapi, an Argentine TV journalist and a diver whose team found a 1906 shipwreck sent a remotely operated vehicle to the spot of the most recent sighting. Bariloche residents keep filming things in the water.
Location Lake Nahuel Huapi, San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina
BARILOCHE, Argentina (reported Sept. 25, 2026) — In San Carlos de Bariloche, writes Argentine TV journalist Daniel Malnatti, there’s a rumor that never quite dies. Someone is always sure they saw something break the surface of Lake Nahuel Huapi: a giant shadow under the water, a pair of dark humps, or the classic long neck rising for a moment before it sinks out of sight.
Where it started
The original social media post
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Bache3000 @bache.3000 on Instagram
👁️ ¿Lo ves? Seguidores de Bache nuestros estaban en el Punto Panorámico cuando algo en el lago llamó su atención. Se acercaron con la lente del celular. Lo que grabaron genera más preguntas que respuestas. Algo se mueve en las heladas aguas del Nahuel Huapi. Por momentos parece separarse. Genera movimiento en la superficie. ¿Qué es? […]
Our translation 👁️ Do you see it? Some of our Bache followers were at the Punto Panorámico when something in the lake caught their attention. They zoomed in with their phone camera. What they recorded raises more questions than answers. Something is moving in the icy waters of Nahuel Huapi. At moments it seems to split apart. It stirs the surface. What is it? […]
The Punto Panorámico video. Bache3000's article about it is undated and says it was recorded "this week."
4.3K likes · 213 comments as of Oct 3, 2026
From the conversation
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No es el nahuelito eran 4 jabalis nadando
Our translation It's not Nahuelito, it was 4 wild boars swimming
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Es un tronco de los pinos que están destrozando
Our translation It's a log from the pines they're tearing down
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Dijo el nahuelito que lo dejen en paz ..
Our translation Nahuelito says leave him alone ..
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Posts shown as originally published; we don’t verify individual comments. Translations are ours. Retrieved . “Load the post here” fetches the original from Instagram, which may set cookies.
That something has one name: “Nahuelito.” Now Malnatti has gone looking for it with a robot.
What we know
On the record: documents, statements, dates and places. Sources below.
- The dive. TN, the Buenos Aires news channel, published Malnatti’s report on Sept. 25, with video credited to Telenoche. Malnatti went out on the lake with Nicolás Mazzola, whom TN describes as a professional diver, filmmaker and specialist in underwater exploration. They used Mazzola’s remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, an underwater robot with cameras and high-powered lights built for deep, low-visibility water.
- The location. “We went to the exact point where the most recent sighting was recorded,” Malnatti wrote. TN didn’t say which sighting that was.
- The diver. According to TN, Mazzola’s team found the wreck of the steamer Helvecia, which sank in 1906, in February 2023, after decades of searching.
- The result. TN’s written report doesn’t describe the robot recording anything unusual.
- The lake. Nahuel Huapi is more than 450 meters deep and covers more than 550 square kilometers, according to TN.
What’s claimed
Accounts, testimony and theories, as told by the people who tell them.
“A presence.” As the robot descended, Malnatti wrote, Mazzola told him that although he has never seen anything strange on his dives, when you go under in that lake you can’t help sensing “a presence, a singular vibration.”
“They saw something.” “The witnesses’ observations shouldn’t be discarded: they saw something,” Malnatti wrote.
A video from May. Followers of the Bariloche news site Bache3000 filmed something in the lake from the Punto Panorámico lookout. According to the site, the object moves beneath the surface, appears at one point to split apart, and leaves visible ripples on the water. “The images recorded this week from the Punto Panorámico don’t prove anything,” the site wrote. “But they don’t disprove it either.” The article itself is undated. Bache3000 posted the video on Instagram on May 9, 2026, with a caption that matches the article’s description, which puts it about a month before the June sighting below. TN didn’t say whether either one is the sighting Malnatti and Mazzola went to.
A dark object in June. On a Sunday in mid-June, around 2 p.m., a dark object was seen and photographed in the lake, the Bariloche newspaper El Cordillerano reported on June 16. Miguel Ángel Rossi, director of the documentary Bajo Superficie, told the paper that it isn’t possible to say for certain what the photo shows. “It’s not clear what’s happening there. What I can add is that in that place similar situations appear every so often,” he said.
Rossi said he holds an unreleased sequence of photos, taken by a photographer who was shooting the landscape, in which something dark rises to the surface at the same spot. “Even a Prefectura [coast guard] boat that was sailing nearby approaches and circles that dark patch. Then the patch disappears and the boat leaves,” he said. He told the paper he also has a photo taken years later by a tourist staying nearby, showing something similar. “With years between them, I have at least four documents related to events of this type,” Rossi said.
A century of Nahuelito
According to TN, the oldest references to strange creatures in the region are tied to the Mapuche myth of El Cuero, a carnivorous monster said to live in the mountain lakes. In 1922, the Italian naturalist and paleontologist Clemente Onelli, then director of the Buenos Aires Zoo, organized the first major expedition to find the creature. Onelli theorized it could be a plesiosaur, the long-necked marine reptile, a shape that fit what local people described. The search became such a phenomenon in Bariloche that residents built a huge figure of the creature, TN reports.
Bache3000 traces the first documented reference to 1910, when a German navigator named George Garret reportedly saw a large creature in the lake. It says President Marcelo T. de Alvear reportedly received an official report on the sightings in the 1920s, and that the story returned to the national papers in the 1960s and 1970s with new photos and new witnesses.
The natural explanations
TN also lays out the explanations offered by science and the physics of the lake: colliding currents, large drifting logs and gas escaping from the lakebed, all of which can create visual patterns “capable of fooling the most experienced eye.” Bache3000 lists other hypotheses scientists have offered over the years, including giant otters, submerged logs and optical effects of wind on the surface.
Malnatti closes on a lake that already has a force of its own. “Perhaps Nahuelito survives precisely because of that,” he wrote. “Because some legends don’t need to be true to say something true about the place that created them.”
Bache3000 put it another way. The lake is deep, cold and still largely unexplored, the site wrote, and what can’t be entirely ruled out can’t be confirmed either.
Sources
- Tras la pista de “Nahuelito”: cómo es explorar el lago Nahuel Huapi con un robot submarino (Spanish) (opens in new tab) — TN (Todo Noticias)
- Un misterioso movimiento en el lago reavivó el mito más viejo de Bariloche (Spanish) (opens in new tab) — Bache3000 The article is undated on the page. Bache3000's Instagram post of the same video is dated May 9, 2026.
- Un extraño objeto oscuro volvió a aparecer en el Nahuel Huapi y reavivó un viejo misterio (Spanish) (opens in new tab) — El Cordillerano