Monte (or San Miguel del Monte, as shown in maps) has two interesting points to its favor: it has a nice lagoon, where you can fish and relax, and its situated only 110 kms. away from Buenos Aires. Despite these facts, this location has had much less touristic development than destinations such as Chascomus, which with a bigger lagoon is located almost twice further from the argentinean capital city.

Until now, Monte used to be a weekend-home location, something we can still notice at places like Los Pinos. But currently, and for a while now, the interest in tourism development is increasing and new hostel and lodge accomodations are being built, usually around the lagoon. There’s also a greater interest from the authorities to preserve the fishing environment to attract more tourists. By the way, you need a permit to fish in the lagoon.

Tourism at Monte is almost exclusively targeted to those who arrive by driving their cars from nearby locations. Why? The city, which has a population of 17 thousand people (spanish), doesn’t count with a transportation service -people ride around in bikes or cars. This is not an impediment to visit Monte, but it can be a problem if what you want is to border the lagoon. And there’s a second point: the bus service from Monte to Buenos Aires (Retiro bus terminal) is frankly bad. The companies won’t sell round trip tickets, so you have to sit at the bus station one hour before the bus -which is coming from other locations- arrives and pray for an available seat. I wonder: is it so difficult for companies like La Estrella or Rio Parana to sell round trip tickets? Is the reservations system so complicated that they can’t work it out, in the Internet age? While I understand that their main target at Monte is the car owner tourist, of higher incomes, I’m not so sure that resolving how uncomfortable it is to travel by bus to a place that is only two hours away from Buenos Aires is totally not worth it.

By the way, the company Microomnibus Brandsen also provides a transportation service, but in this case I couldn’t get their schedule. Because of this, I took the info provided at the official website of San Miguel, although in the case of Rio Parana and La Estrella some information differ (the ones I state are from this last week end and were provided by the companies themselves). All the schedules I collected are available at WikiNomade (spanish only).

In the case of not finding bus tickets to Retiro, there are other ways to leave Monte, for example, Rio Parana has bus services that departs Monte to other destinations such as Moron, Ciudadela, Cañuelas and La Plata. In the case of the last two locations, you can take there the Roca train service that goes to Constitucion train station in Buenos Aires.

The line that departs from Constitucion to Bahia Blanca stops at Monte. The service is available 5 days a week.