Camping and Nature at Popy`s Ranch

The First Campsites

For over fifteen years, a group of physical education professors graduated in the city of Olavarría began to build the dream they had always longed for: settling down a spot where they could co-exist in harmony with nature without any mediators or impediments.

And with a great effort, there arose the famous ranch that allowed most elementary schools from the province of Buenos Aires and the rest of the country to see the beautiful city of Tandil.

Christened as El Rancho de Popy (Popy’s Ranch), in honor to the first settler of these lands after Indian domination, this place works as an entertaining center where contingents of young people or family groups may come to perform all kind of adventure activities.

Three hundred and fifty hectares of forests, mountains and lakes allow visitors to practice mountain activities such as rapelling, rope or technique climbing, tyrolese ropes and hiking, as well as sport pejerrey fishing and Canadian canoeing in lagoons and quarries.

Walter Ignacio Rossi, owner and director of this place says that “most families that visit this place choose the multi-adventure program. This is a daily outing that takes about two or three hours and allows them to be in contact with sports such as rappeling, climbing, cable car, mountain biking and hiking. Activities chosen by most people for being safe and amusing both for grown-ups and children”.

Youths, on the one hand, dream of spending the night in some of the mountain shelters of the area. They have the possibility of making a barbecue in the moonlight under the stars with a bonfire and guitar playing included in the various shelters located within the boundaries of the ranch.


The Company’s Time

For a while, the large and medium-sized companies have started to look for places located outside their usual circuits in the capital city in order to develop training programs, leadership, inner communication, public relations and human resources.

And they have realized that, even if moving their employees out of their routines and labor environments is quite expensive, the benefits these new training trips generate are really high.

The fact that a group of employees of the same company meet suddenly and interact in a wild environment totally different from the office and its codes began to be taken into consideration by the public relations and communications departments.

Walter Rossi asserts that these meetings are spectacular. “Groups of all kinds have come here, and the best of it all is that they did not even know where they were in the map, as the destination is most times also unknown. The point is that suddenly, people who usually work together eight hours a day meet in a totally unknown environment where the office hierarchies are part of the past. They have to cook, play, go through controlled risky situations, do common tasks, sleep on a tent, as well as develop all the activities we have prepared for them. And I can assure that it is a weekend they will never forget. And to top it all, it is useful for companies to improve their inner relationships and continue growing”.

Walter’s words sound real and they become true when we observe a group that has been working out a leadership problem in their commercial department for a week. These office clerks do not have the slightest idea that a group of students from an elementary school from the Federal District are almost one kilometer from there enjoying their first campsite experience, and that they have gone out in search for wood to make a great farewell bonfire.

The immensity of the venue prevents these new company activities from overlapping with the activities performed by the youths, students or families: each of them is in their own world. A world where Popy’s Ranch has settled for many years in an ideal scenery for dreams and illusions of both adults and children to come true.