Nahuelmar Casino, lower floor
The casino downstairs
It is inside the lodge itself. Walk to the far end of the hall, past the fireplace, and take the stone stair down, or use the lift, which reaches the same floor in one stop. Either way you arrive in your indoor shoes without stepping outside, which matters more than it sounds in a Bariloche July.
The room shares the lower floor with Bar Piedra and the bath house. At the door there is a desk, and the first thing the person behind it does is look at your identification.
The casino has been in this cellar since 1971, when the old wine store was cleared out and the vault re-floored, and it hasn't grown by a square metre since.
What the room is like
Most people's first word for it is small. It holds a few tables and a short bar along the stone wall, and on a full Saturday in August there might be forty people in it. The ceiling is the original vaulted stone, the lamps are low and warm, and the floor is the same slate as the boot store.
It opens in the evening and stays shut during the day, and there is no slot hall or second room behind this one. When the last table closes, the lights go off and the door is locked until the following evening.
It is small, so it is quiet, and you can hear the fire upstairs through the stairwell. Staff know the regulars by name within about three nights.
At a glance
- Wherelower floor of the lodge
- Getting therestone stair or one stop in the lift
- Openevenings, from 20:00
- Closeswhen the last table does
- Sizea few tables, one bar
- Age18, the legal age in Río Negro
- Identificationchecked at the door, every visit
- Dressneat, no ski boots, no wet coats
Eighteen, and the door means it
The legal age for gaming in Río Negro Province is 18, and nobody is exempt on any evening. Photo identification is checked at the door on every visit, whether it is your first night or your seventh and whether or not the staff recognise you. Bring a passport or national document, since a photograph of one on a telephone isn't accepted.
If you are staying with children, they are welcome everywhere in the lodge except the gaming room, and there is no lobby attached to it where a young person could sit and wait.
Dress
Dress neatly: a clean shirt or a jumper, and trousers that aren't ski trousers. We ask people to leave boots, wet shells and rucksacks in the boot store on the way down, because the slate floor is dangerous when wet and the room is too small to put a rucksack anywhere sensible. Nobody will turn you away over the colour of a collar.
Limits are set on the floor
Table limits are set by the staff working the floor that evening, and they shift with how busy the room is and who is at the table, so no schedule is published and this website carries no list. Ask before you sit down: the person running the table will tell you what applies, and would much prefer that to you sitting down on an assumption.
Staff can also set a personal limit with you: a ceiling for the evening, a time to stop, a break at a fixed hour. You arrange it face to face, at the desk or at the table, and it is written down and honoured for that visit.
Taking a break, or stopping for good
If you want to exclude yourself from the gaming floor, for a week, a season or permanently, you arrange it in person at reception. A member of the duty staff will sit down with you, write it out and keep it on file here. It can't be arranged by email, telephone or this website, and nobody outside the lodge is involved.
The casino floor gives no credit, and there is no cash machine on the lower level.
This is a land-based casino
The room is a physical place with a stone floor under the hall, inside the hotel at Avenida del Cipresal 2140. The casino exists only there, during its evening hours.
This website offers no online games, takes no bets, holds no accounts and accepts no deposits or payments. If you ever see a page claiming to be our casino and asking you for money, it isn't us. Anything you pay the lodge, you pay at the front desk, in person.
Questions people ask at the desk
- Do I have to be a guest? No. The casino is open to visitors from outside, on the same terms and with the same check at the door.
- Can I reserve a seat? No. Tables are taken as people arrive.
- Is there a photographer, or cameras? Security cameras cover the room, as the law requires. Guests are asked not to use telephones or take photographs at the tables.
- What if I have had too much to drink? Staff won't seat you. They will tell you discreetly and never discuss it in front of the room.
- Can I just look? Yes, if you are 18 and have identification with you. People come down, stand at the bar for ten minutes and go back up to the fire.
The rest of the lower floor
One stair brings you to the bar, the bath house and the gaming room, and over an evening people move between all three. That is how the floor was laid out when the cellars were opened up in the nineteen sixties.
Guests with no interest in the casino use the stair all the same, since the sauna is at the other end of the same corridor.
- Bar Piedrafrom 18:00, small plates to 23:00
- Bath housesauna and plunge, to 21:00
- Gaming roomfrom 20:00, 18 and over
- Liftserves this floor from the hall