Welcome to Patagonia’s Route of Parks, the world’s largest conservation project

The wind was fierce, and cold rain needled my eyeballs. I kept my arms down in case I lifted off in my fetching orange life vest and windproof ensemble.

Gusts of up to 150 kilometers per hour are common at Cape Horn, and our previous attempt to make land here was scuppered by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans colliding viciously at the start of the infamous Drake Passage.

This time though, we did it, my feet firmly planted in front of the albatross sculpture, a landmark in memory of the lost souls of more than 700 shipwrecks, in Chile’s 17th national park. The long grasses rippled green and gold in the wind, and I knew I was fortunate to have made it here.

Depending on which way you look at it, Cape Horn is the start or the finish of Chile’s Ruta de los Parques (Route of Parks). Launched in 2018, the route is the result of a 25-year effort by Doug and Kristine Tompkins, former leading lights of outdoor clothing brands The North Face and Patagonia respectively, to protect and expand Chile’s southerly natural habitats.

From Puerto Montt down to the tip of the Southern Cone, it’s the world’s most audacious conservation and tourism project, and the largest private land donation in history, creating five new parks and expanding three others. Covering 1,740 miles of land and sea, encompassing 60 communities, 140 species of birds and 46 types of mammal, it makes up roughly one third of Chile and 91 per cent of its protected land—superlatives quickly dry up when describing its scale.

The Tompkins duo spent a large part of their youth trekking in Patagonia. Perhaps unsurprising since the granite towers, glaciers and lakes of Torres del Paine, Chilean Patagonia’s literal rock star, are the pristine embodiment of adventure travel, the backdrop to many outdoor gear campaigns—and climbing is partly what hooked Doug in the early days.

What is astonishing is that the Tompkins would spend the rest of their lives and finances to gift more than one million acres to the Chilean people, as well as handing over large land parcels in Argentina, where conservation projects are ongoing.

As Kristine Tompkins puts it, the real strategy is “to try to throw the brakes on the extinction crisis.” From reintroducing jaguars in 2018 in Argentina, to improving numbers of the critically endangered huemul South Andean deer in Chile, “restore, repopulate and rewild” appears to be their mantra.

For Chile, this was about more than conservation. Before the pandemic, it was an economic driver for the sparsely populated extreme south, with more jobs in tourism than there ever could be in farming. For reasons we’re all too aware of COVID-19 may well have changed these prospects—for how long, we don’t know. But the hope was, and remains, that fewer young people will depart for the big cities, crafts people will have a wider audience, and small communities will be able to provide and profit from sustainable accommodation.

“My end desire is that the communities along this route see these parks as theirs,” says Kristine Tompkins, “that they have a sense of ownership and pride.” Already, there’s fresh produce for local consumption, native forest honey and artisanal wool and wood products. Not only that, but the entire team working for Tompkins Conservation in Chile is Chilean. “We’re stepping out,” says Tompkins. “This is Chile’s.”

This game-changing collaboration also opened the world’s eyes to the lesser-known areas of the extreme south, hopefully reducing the pressure on Patagonia’s big hitters. As travelers seek out remote destinations along the Ruta de los Parques, where communities benefit more, this may well work out in the long-term.

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Most of us know about the Patagonian ‘beauty strip’, as Kristine puts it, from photos of sparkling turquoise pools and Andean peaks on social media. But Tompkins Conservation is as much concerned with the hinterland beyond, where logging and over-grazing have been divesting the land of ecosystems. For Doug, it was seeing 1,000-year-old giant alerce trees, relatives of north America’s beloved sequoia, that sealed his desire to act. Despite his death in 2015, the result of a kayaking accident in Chile, the passion behind this project has not waned.

And as Kristine Tompkins puts it, the real strategy is “to try to throw the brakes on the extinction crisis.” From reintroducing jaguars in 2018 in Argentina, to improving numbers of the critically endangered huemul South Andean deer in Chile, ‘restore, repopulate and rewild ‘ appears to be their mantra.

While the physical expanses between these previously unconnected national parks hasn’t changed, the collective, national desire to join them together has. It was a big, bold idea to try to link the Carretera Austral to Patagonia and the southerly Magellanes region, and this has since taken hold as a cherished notion, an ethical statement of Chile’s commitment to the planet.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing. I remember Chileans expressing suspicion over their motives—stories of the greedy gringos (foreigners), buying up large tracts of land in the south. The Tompkins’ first project was to buy Pumalín, an area stretching from the Argentine border to the Pacific. At first, they were vilified, despite buying the land from struggling Belgian farmers: “We were famously known as the couple who cut Chile in half.” And although the ongoing philanthropy has helped to dampen the chorus of disapproval, there are still many who rue the loss of farming land.

As the rewilding of Patagonia allows for the land to heal after centuries of gold prospectors and sheep farmers, it seems ironic that another wave of visitors might help to replenish the land through responsible travel, alongside CONAF’s [National Forest Corporation] careful management.

Yet, despite the controversy, they’ve won over successive governments. What former leader Michelle Bachelet started, her opposition successor Sebastián Piñera has continued. And activism has played an important part in it all—the Tompkins not only supported but led campaigns to halt further damage, including the long-fought but successful action to stop the mega-dam, HidroAysén project, as well as lobbying against logging and polluting, salmon farms.

Over many years as a past resident of Chile, I’ve traveled around in and around what’s now Ruta de los Parques from the lakes at Puerto Montt to the southerly icefields in Tierra del Fuego, with long weekends to the often-rainy Aysén region, by sea to the misty glacier at Laguna San Rafael, crossing the channel at Punta Delgada to see Commerson’s dolphins and southern crested caracaras.

I spent days spent trekking the ‘W’ route in Torres del Paine, while a pre-pandemic tour in a 4WD with guide Gonzalo Villarroel allowed me to see Paine in nearly all of its sensory glory. Gonzalo warned me to steer clear of a small but deadly native skunk as he pointed out hidden foxes and skittish herds of guanaco (a camelid similar to the llama).

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More recently, I’d traveled on ships which sail the channels charted by colonialist Ferdinand de Magellan—his navigation 500 years ago of the sea route through the 17,000-plus island archipelago from the Atlantic to the Pacific resulted in the world’s first circumnavigation, although there’s some dispute over whether he can be described as the ‘first to sail around the world’ as he was killed in a battle on Mactan Island in the Philippines during the voyage.

On zodiac trips with Chilean expedition company Australis, through iceberg-filled lagoons, I’d also seen some of the remoter parts of the route, including the towering glaciers in Alberto de Agostini National Park.

Many of the national parks are only accessible by sea, like Isla Magdalena’s penguin colony and little known Corcovado. Pali Aike, the volcanic national park that takes its name from the Tehuelche people, means desolate place, but it’s worth the journey, an archaeological site dating back thousands of years, according to Australis expedition leader Cristian Manca.

Manca explains the impact on the five original indigenous groups living on the archipelago. From the fierce Tehuelche to the Yaghan, these groups were decimated by disease, dispersal and the agriculture policies that came with the Europeans.

“Spotting the fires that local tribes had lit on some of the islands, Magellan’s crew were greeted by six-foot-tall natives, their feet wrapped in guanaco skins.” As Manca explains, Patagon (‘big foot’ in Spanish), and Tierra del Fuego (the land of fire) were unsurprisingly adopted as monikers for this southerly realm.

As the rewilding of Patagonia allows for the land to heal after centuries of gold prospectors and sheep farmers, it seems ironic that another wave of visitors might help to replenish the land through responsible travel, alongside CONAF’s [National Forest Corporation] careful management.

Sailors proverbially say that ‘below 40 degrees’ latitude, there is no law; below 50, there is no God’. But there, at 56 degrees south, I’m sure there’s something divine. I have yet to see Quelat’s hanging gla­­­cier, the fabled bay at Tortel and Corcovado National Park—and so many places on this vast route have not felt humanity’s footfall at all. Antarctica might be the earth’s last wilderness, but parts of Chile’s Ruta de los Parques come a very close second.