The Llao Llao Hotel is a hilltop retreat on a peninsula near Bariloche, framed by Lake Nahuel Huapi and Lake Moreno. In the account of Josef Mengele and Martha Mengele’s 1958 honeymoon, its grand buildings and mountain setting make it both a place of striking natural beauty and an apparent refuge from the outside world.

Setting and Arrival

After their private wedding in Nueva Helvecia, Uruguay, Josef and Martha set out for Bariloche in a Borgward Isabella. Martha curled up beside Josef at the wheel as the route crossed the spinach-green pampas and then rougher, rocky country beneath vast skies. Thorny trails threaded through the landscape before the road climbed toward the jagged Andes. The couple skirted a lake to reach Bariloche and, at last, their hotel.

The Hotel and Its Landscape

The Llao Llao Hotel is described as sublime. Flowers and chocolates awaited the newlyweds in a deluxe room whose furnishings were sober rather than ornate. From the terrace, they could see Lake Nahuel Huapi and Lake Moreno encircling the peninsula and hilltop hotel. Its sloping-roofed buildings suggested a medieval German village, an image that casts the hotel as a protected enclave set apart from the world’s disorder.

The surrounding landscape makes that impression vivid without making the place merely decorative. On her first morning, Martha watched mist evaporate at dawn and trembled at the scale of the scene: purple peaks, shafts of light through forests of Antarctic beech and snowy oak. Their first evening brought spit-roasted Patagonian lamb. Martha was happy in this setting, where the hotel’s shelter and the grandeur beyond it seemed to reinforce one another.

Honeymoon and Narrative Significance

The stay also exposes a contrast between the refuge the hotel appears to offer and Josef’s unsettled inner life. He had slept restlessly and remained buried under the covers while Martha took in the dawn. He was disconcerted by the honeymoon itself, having never expected to tolerate another woman’s presence. Yet Martha’s gentleness and patience allowed him to talk at length during their hikes, including about the fall of Rome and the lives of Wagner and Albrecht von Haller, a founder of German biology who had conducted anatomical experiments on animal organs.

Josef’s response to Martha was not simply intellectual companionship: he found that he desired her more than he had desired any woman before. The narrative presents this discovery against the honeymoon’s composed scenery, making the hotel a setting for unexpected intimacy as well as retreat. After they returned to Buenos Aires, Josef gave Martha a house by the ocean at a seaside resort; the hotel stay thus marks a change in their relationship that carried beyond Bariloche.