PATAGONIA: Spectacular Scenery and Abundant Wildlife

View from Hosteria Pehoe in Torres del Paine National Park, Chile

The trip to Patagonia in 1995 is among our top family vacations ever. At the extreme southern tip of South America,  Patagonia is a land of rugged seashores, jagged mountains, enormous glaciers, and vast, windy grasslands. It is half the size of Alaska with just 1.5 million inhabitants. As the climber Yvon Chouinard, founder of the Patagonia outdoor clothing line, says, “It is a mystical, almost imaginary place.” 

Rounding up the cattle

Some people in Patagonia live on remote estancias, or ranches, but the majority reside in Punta Arenas, a city that had its heyday in the era of clipper ships.  In those days, before the Panama Canal was built, ships traveling from Europe and the east coasts of the Americas had to go around the southern tip of South America to reach San Francisco and other west coast ports.  Victorian style architecture still dominates Punta Arenas.

Magellanic Penguin

Punta Arenas (which means Sandy Point in Spanish) sits on the edge of the Straits of Magellan, the connector of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We flew into the Punta Arenas airport and then rented a car and drove north to the spectacular national park, Torres del Paine, passing few cars or signs of habitation on the way.  We did stop at a penguin colony and walked the paths between the nesting burrows of Magellanic penguins, who go there each Austral summer to raise their chicks. (See my post for June 20, 2011.)

Mustering the sheep on the Patagonian plain.

The broad plains bordering the Straits of Magellan provide rich grazing for huge herds of sheep and cattle and nesting grounds for millions of birds.  As we drove north we were awed by the giant flocks of flamingos, endless nesting geese, and vast array of small birds, all in the midst of laying eggs and rearing their young.

Torres del Paine is truly one of the last Edens on Earth.  Towering granite peaks rise above ice cold lakes, and flocks of giant Andean condors soar on the updrafts created by the ever present winds that collide with the mountains.  On the grassy slopes below the peaks, herds of guanacos, once in danger of becoming extinct, are now multiplying. Patagonia is a wildlife photographer’s paradise. I used a few of the photos we took of guanacos, foxes, penguins, and rheas (South American relatives of ostriches) to illustrate my book South American Animals (Morrow, 1999.)

Guanaco, Torres del Paine

In Torres del Paine we stayed at Hosteria Pehoe, a comfortable and somewhat rustic hotel with a spectacular view of the “torres”, or towers, of rock that are the iconic image of the park.  The hotel where we stayed when we went to Chile’s Atacama desert four years ago, the Tierra Atacama, has recently opened a sister hotel in Torres del Paine called the Tierra Patagonia.  Here’s a short (one minute) video from Tierra Patagonia that gives an overview of what you can expect when you visit the park.  It brought back many memories for us.  We’d love to go back someday.  Perhaps we will!