It is located just 30 km away to the South of Sarmiento, Argentina. This provincial natural monument is a forest from the Cenozoic Era. That means it is approximately 65 million years old.
These petrified trees, witnesses of Prehistory, make up an indescribable beauty given by the hardness of the rock, the color of the different geologic strata and the heavy silence of respect for nature.
Its petrified logs are part of the result of the effect of millions of years on the wood. At the beginning of the Tertiary Era, the Andes Mountain Range rose and thus, prevented the humidity from the Pacific from getting through. At the same time, eruptions were produced and the ash deposits spread around giving way to a slow process of transformation of these logs into stone.
There are plenty of logs in the volcanic sediments of its soil. Some of them have a significant size and it has been established that they were originated in the Lower Tertiary Period (Paleocene).
The tiny grains of pollen of these sediments were studied in order to reconstruct the kind of vegetation dominating the area with extreme detail. The plants used to belong to a temperate to tropical warm kind of weather with significant humidity.
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