World’s Largest “Natural” Climbing Wall Faces Demolition for Bigger Highway

Buenos Aires climbers have finally had enough.

For six years, members of Centro Andino Buenos Aires (CABA), Argentina’s largest mountaineering organization, have been resisting the city’s plan to demolish their 43-year-old training ground. The world’s largest “natural” rock climbing wall, La Palestra de Andinismo, is on track to be destroyed to make room for additional lanes on a highway overpass.

“We don’t have mountains here,” says Maria Perin, a Buenos Aires local who passed the entrance exam to use La Palestra just last year. “To get to any real climbing, you have to travel two hours by car or 1,200 kilometers.” She says that the rock wall, which is designed specifically to train climbers for long routes in the Andes, is “our mountain in the city.”

On September 6, CABA members took to the streets to protest the overpass construction, which they want the city to redesign around La Palestra. More than 100 climbers marched through the coastal Núñez neighborhood in harnesses and helmets. Some carried coiled ropes, megaphones, and Argentine flags. Pink, blue, and orange powder drifted into the air and left the streets hazy. Most of the group sported white t-shirts with “No a la Demolición” printed in red capital letters.

 

 

By the end of the march, several people had spray-painted the slogan “La Pale No Se Toca” (“Don’t Touch La Pale,” a nickname for La Palestra) across the curbs. Since then, they have been circulating a petition to stop the demolition; it currently has 4,500 signatures.

Construction on the bridge has been ongoing for 10 months, since January 2025. In May, a municipal judge granted a preliminary injunction and ordered the city’s contractor not to destroy La Palestra until he could issue a ruling. This injunction stands today, but the climbers are worried that they could lose access to their training ground immediately if the ultimate ruling does not go their way.

“It’s a mess,” says Fabricio Gatti, an economist who has spent 15 years climbing at La Palestra, where he also instructs new climbers. “We don’t know what we will do,” he says.

A six-year battle comes to a head

September’s protest was not the first time CABA members held a demonstration to try and save their training facility. The first was back in August 2019, after city officials first announced that the overpass, Labruna Bridge, would be widened to connect the University of Buenos Aires with the city’s new entrepreneurship center, Innovation Park. After being informed that La Palestra would be demolished in the process, CABA members protested in the streets. They also requested that the city designate La Palestra as a protected cultural site, to no avail.

In late 2024, city officials announced that the municipal government would fund the construction of a “climbing wall” in Olympic Park, about 10 minutes away from La Palestra’s current location. But CABA leaders rejected this alternative, arguing that La Palestra’s unique features, such as cracks that hold climbing gear, cannot be replaced by plastic holds.

“They want to build a bouldering area, and it’s not the same, obviously,” says Gatti. Buenos Aires has roughly a dozen indoor climbing gyms already. Gym holds, he argues, are no match for real stone, especially for teaching trad climbing, anchor building, and crack climbing techniques. “When you go to Chaltén and there’s a crack in the rock, you’re confident climbing it because you’ve been doing the same thing in Buenos Aires.”

A training ground for Patagonia

Argentina’s capital sits over 1,000 miles north of El Chaltén, whose snow-capped spires, turquoise lakes, and unpredictable weather hold both unfiltered beauty and danger. However, for aspiring climbers in Buenos Aires to unlock their geological inheritance, they need a place to learn foundational skills.

In most cities, this role falls to local crags. But in Buenos Aires, La Palestra is the only option. “There are other places in Argentina—maybe Mendoza, maybe Chaltén, but they are very far away from Buenos Aires,” says Gatti. “That’s why it’s so important to us. It’s the only place we have to do that.”

Founded in 1950, CABA has seen its members make the second ascent of Cerro Chaltén (Fitz Roy) and put the first Argentinian on Mount Everest. It wasn’t until 1982, however, that CABA representative Julio Corradi convinced the national Secretary of Sports, Alberto Dallo, that the Buenos Aires mountaineering community needed an artificial climbing wall that mimicked real rock features found in Patagonia. The Argentinian government funded the center, letting CABA members oversee the construction of slabs, cracks, and chimneys. Mounds of heavy slate were imported from San Luis, a province 800 km to the west, and glued together with concrete.

La Palestra’s two parallel, 55-foot-tall walls are each built with thousands of slate stones to mimic natural rock features such as cracks and hairline crimps. Together, they offer 150 routes across 2,400 square meters of vertical terrain. As the largest urban climbing wall made from natural rocks in the world, the facility hosts several courses in CABA’s mountain guide training program, as well as training for firefighters, police officers, soldiers, and special forces.

“Our mountain in the city”

Thanks to intentional design, La Palestra serves as a world-class trad climbing simulator. On the outside of both walls, thousands of slate chunks, each around the size of a toaster, have been cemented together to create an intricate web of cracks that spider upward for 55 feet and outward for 130 feet. Stainless steel bolts drilled 10 feet off the ground let climbers practice building anchors in natural terrain. The center of one outer wall folds open into a flared chimney.

By contrast, the inside walls are nearly featureless. Stacked concrete layers barely offset each other with micro-edges every six inches—perfect for slab climbers. On one wall, a textured splitter crack rises up from the center. Six other vertical cracks appear throughout the two structures.

On a typical weekend, more than 100 climbers and instructors flock to La Palestra, practicing a variety of outdoor skills that go beyond the typical gym repertoire: hand jams, finger cracks, chimneys, anchor building, gear placement, rappelling, multi-pitching, self-rescue, belay transitions, and even dry tooling. Strangers on the sandy ground become acquaintances, then evolve to multi-pitch partners.

Local climber Maria Perin describes the training center as life-changing. “I always loved mountaineering and trekking, but I saw climbing as a sport that other people did,” she says. Now, she climbs at La Palestra three to four times per week and tries out new skills under the supervision of more experienced climbers. “It’s a community,” she insists. “We all take care of each other.”

The fate of La Palestra

The climbers’ September 6 protest caught the attention of the City Legislature of Buenos Aires. Three weeks after the march, the Legislature ordered the mayor’s office to deliver updates on the Palestra’s relocation, including details on whether the new climbing wall would have identical technical characteristics, dimensions, materials, and conditions as the original.

The climbers doubt this will happen. “They haven’t even started building it,” says Gatti. “That’s why we’re fighting to preserve the place we actually have.”

But time is running out. The new Labruna Bridge is scheduled to open to the public by the middle of 2026, and the municipal judge could rule on La Palestra’s demolition any time before that. As part of the temporary injunction granted in May, the judge ordered the city’s contractor, Autopistas Urbanas Sociedad Anónima (AUSA), to negotiate with the climbers. “The judge wants CABA and AUSA to come to an agreement,” explains Perin, “so they make the new Palestra how we want them to. But this hasn’t happened yet.”

Right now, the climbers are calling for support from the greater climbing community in raising awareness about their campaign to save La Palestra. CABA’s main argument is that the city should make the historic rock wall a protected cultural site—then the city would have to build around it.

Perin invites tourists to visit La Palestra in Buenos Aires, take a class with CABA, and see what is happening for themselves. “The most important thing is that right now, [La Palestra] exists. We have it, and we don’t want it to be demolished.”

If the training center stays open, Perin intends to focus on getting better at trad climbing. “I have a lot of dreams,” she says. “I’m planning a trip to Córdoba and Mendoza.” Someday, she’d also like to go to Frey, a spire-filled climbing area in Patagonia. “But I need more experience with gear placement first.”

Readers can sign the climbers’ petition here.

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