Democratizing the mountains: Inside Santiago’s bid to turn itself into the ‘Kathmandu of the Americas’

There was a glacier crying frozen tears somewhere just beyond the ridgeline up above. They tumbled down the mountain in crystal-clear streams, landing in my cupped hands. I scooped the ancient water into my mouth. I splashed it across my sun-burnt face, and it stung my skin.

Rejuvenated, I hiked further up an arid slope to a distant viewpoint. It had been half-toppled in the brisk winds that regularly thunder through this alpine corridor. Yet, it was clear to me, standing there, surrounded by all that distant ice, why this place had finally earned some of the protection it deserves.

The emerald green Olivares River squeezed in raging rapids through a narrow valley below. Above, pearly white snow accentuated the toothy contours of hostile granite peaks. I’d stumbled across a vision, not unlike the Annapurna Region of Nepal—a place avid hikers liken to nirvana. Yet, this was a world away in the Andes of Central Chile, whose mountains are no less mighty though far fewer explored.

Pilar Valenzuela had brought me here to show me the Olivares and Colorado River Valleys—how they wiggle and wander and cleave scars into the Andes. She’s the campaign coordinator of Queremos Parque (“We Want a Park”), the grassroots environmental movement with more signatures (over 200,000) than any other in the history of Chile. It’s all about these valleys, some of which had once been army-owned, and how they should be protected as a national park.

“Chile has a long history of having everything private,” she said as we pushed onward through scree over to a pair of droopy maitén trees for some much-needed shade. “The mountains have owners. The rivers and lakes do, too. But to make environmental justice, we need more public protected areas for the people.”

Just 90 minutes earlier, Valenzuela and I had been strolling beneath glassine skyscrapers on the frenetic streets of Santiago. Its residents, she said, lack proper access to these high Andes. Yes, the mountains form a perennial snow-capped spine on the city’s eastern horizon.

But mining and energy interests have gated off virtually all access routes for decades. Now, the arid river valleys we hiked into might signal a turning point; they may hold the key to unlocking this cloud-hugged terrain—not only for the seven million people who live beneath it in the Chilean capital, but also for hikers and mountaineers the world over.

Earlier this year, Chile’s outgoing center-right President Sebastián Piñera announced the creation of Santiago Glaciers National Park. The new reserve would protect not only 18,000 hectares (44,500 acres) of glaciers, which are vital to the city’s water supply, but also crucial habitat for native fauna, such as colocolo wildcats, black-chested buzzard-eagles, pumas and Andean condors.

The declaration on March 6 2022 was the culmination of an extensive campaign from Queremos Parque, which had been lobbying the government since April 2019 to transform the formerly army-owned land in the Olivares and Colorado River Valleys into a public park. It was also a boon to the wider goal of transforming Santiago into a “world capital of mountain tourism”—something akin to the Kathmandu of the Americas.

Of course, coloring a chunk of land green on a map is one thing. Turning it into an actual park is another.

Access to Santiago Glaciers National Park still involves crossing a gate near the town of El Alfalfal, which is manned by the Alto Maipo Hydroelectric Project. Meanwhile, a cement company, Cementos Bio Bio, operates in the middle of the Colorado Valley. There’s also the thorny issue of squatters, who’ve ranched these alpine valleys for generations without owning the land. If Santiago is to become the mountain capital it wants to be—one with a vibrant national park right on its doorstep—competing interests with divergent views will have to search hard for common ground.

News of the new national park this past March came as a bittersweet victory for Valenzuela. Sure, it would protect the area’s glaciers, but it would only cover about half of the 142,000 hectares (350,900 acres) that Queremos Parque believes is necessary to build viable biological corridors. Moreover, the 75,000 hectares (185,330 acres) currently protected all lie above 3,600 meters (nearly 12,000ft)—far from any existing public road (and far from democratizing these mountains for the citizens in Santiago below).

“There is a fear that, if the park happens, the animals will automatically have to leave. There’s so much that’s still unknown. Everything has been kind of hidden. It’s like, yeah, there’s going to be a park, but nobody knows what that means.”

- Daniela Carrasco, rancher

“For me, it was like, ‘that’s not the whole park’,” said Valenzuela. “But, of course, in the end, we had a political win. We have half of the work done, but the other half will be even more challenging.”

If the park is to cover the base of the Colorado and Olivares River Valleys, the new leftist government of Gabriel Boric will first have to consider provisional mining rights from Chile’s state-owned Codelco (and other smaller companies)—they technically have rights to the subsoil, but not the surface. The government could still declare the area parkland without legal conflicts, but then the mines could later present projects within the zone (though this would likely create a PR nightmare and would almost certainly cause issues if an environmental impact study was carried out).

More challenging, still, is the issue of the ranchers, whose livestock severely degrades this fragile ecosystem, which is full of low shrubs and flowering Nassauvia-type herbs. Valenzuela is keenly aware of both issues. She’s made it her goal of goading the mining companies and befriending the ranchers, addressing the latter’s concerns and advising them of the benefits of ecotourism.

Valenzuela often hires ranchers as mountain guides for multi-day excursions to remote Andean attractions, including the tiered thermal pools of Baños Azules or the ethereal wind-carved ice blades called penitentes, which point toward the sun on peaks above 4,000 meters (13,125ft). Yet, despite years of traveling together, many ranchers remain skeptical of Valenzuela’s intentions.

“There is a fear that, if the park happens, the animals will automatically have to leave,” explained Daniela Carrasco who, at 35, is among the younger generation of ranching families. “There’s so much that’s still unknown. Everything has been kind of hidden. It’s like, yeah, there’s going to be a park, but nobody knows what that means.”

However, Carrasco likes the potential of selling her family’s goat cheese direct to tourists. She also thinks her and her husband could make additional income from offering horseback riding trips. “I guess you could see an increase in earnings,” she said. “But I’m still unsure if it’s a good thing or not. I don’t see so clearly how you can supplement livestock farming with tourism.”

Carrasco comes from a long line of huasos (Chilean cowboys) dating back to her great-grandfather. “These are generations of families who live here, who have spent their whole lives here,” she told us. “So, you can’t just come one day and take these old folks out and tell them to make a new life somewhere else.”

That’s what they’re fighting for more than anything else, she added, “to be able to maintain these traditions, this way of life.”

Queremos Parque hopes to find a workaround to help expand the park into the lower valleys while allowing the ranchers to remain in certain areas—at least for the short-term—so they can experience the financial benefits of tourism.

But Valenzuela is worried that CONAF, Chile’s park service, isn’t interested in making compromises. “If they are not more open-minded, we will have a conflict for many years—and maybe we’ll never have the full park,” she said. “So, we say ‘make the park with cowboys inside’.”

Moises Grimberg, who leads planning and development at CONAF’s reserves, said the agency was committed “to advance gradually in the protection of the surrounding areas, though that will happen following an in-depth analysis.”

Few visitors venture off to see what these mountains hold. Residents of Santiago barely did either until pandemic boredom found them flocking in mass to the private parks in the pre-Andean hills—many for the first time—discovering an asset just beyond city limits they’d long overlooked.

Accessibility remains a major hurdle though. “It’s one of the most complex things we need to evaluate,” Grimberg said. “We’re going to keep trying to look at which protection objectives these other places can have to strengthen the high mountain zone, and also look at what accessibility we can grant to strengthen the public use of these areas.

Visitors to Santiago are often dazzled by the city’s proximity to the Andes. They ride elevators to the tops of skyscrapers for better views. They plan pisco sours for sunset to catch the alpenglow. They shove cameras through hotel windows, capturing the grandeur of the tallest mountains outside the Himalayas, which cast shadows over the Chilean capital.

There are six Andean peaks above 6,000 meters (19,685ft) right in Santiago’s backyard. They harbor raging whitewater, teal lagoons and gurgling geothermal pools. Outside of the ever-shorter austral ski season, however, few visitors venture off to see what these mountains hold. Residents of Santiago barely did either until pandemic boredom found them flocking in mass to the private parks in the pre-Andean hills—many for the first time—discovering an asset just beyond city limits they’d long overlooked.

Around that same time, during the early days of the pandemic, while Queremos Parque was busy lobbying for a new national park, a separate, more business-minded group was working behind the scenes to build the foundations for a thriving outdoors industry. The Andes Santiago program, created in 2020, unites various local government entities, tourism boards, ski resorts and outdoor groups to raise the quality of Santiago’s mountains, as well as their profile, both nationally and internationally.

Funded primarily by CORFO, a Chilean governmental organization tasked with promoting economic growth, it’s now in the third year of an ambitious 10-year plan to transform Santiago into a “world capital of mountain tourism” by 2030. That involves training mountain guides up to the highest international standards (such as UIAGM), enhancing the level of the local tourism offer, teaching urban communities how to interact with nature, and developing public use plans for many city-adjacent parklands.

“Everybody who comes to Chile wants to go to Torres del Paine [in Patagonia] or San Pedro [in the Atacama Desert], but we want them to stay here and do things very similar,” said Martín Le-Bert, CEO of Andes Santiago. “The Central Andes are the highest mountains outside the Himalaya, so they are huge. Many people who might frequent the Alps or the Rockies can come here and see these mountains that are actually a lot wilder.”

Chile has a six-year winning streak as the World’s Leading Adventure Tourism Destination at the World Travel Awards, which bills itself as the Oscars of travel. It’s a reputation cultivated, in large part, by Patagonia, the nation’s remote southerly extreme, which is home to 17 sprawling national parks and less than 300,000 people. Meanwhile, less than one percent of Chile’s protected areas lie in the Metropolitan Region, where 40 percent of Chile’s 19 million residents live.

Opening the Andes above Santiago to tourism could have a radical impact on the way citizens view the outdoors, as well as drastically increase the availability of nature in a city where less than six percent of the population has access to a nearby green space.

Much of Le-Bert’s work with Andes Santiago focuses on infrastructure and development. The most ambitious plan is a 150-kilometer-long (93-mile) trail beginning near ski resorts like Valle Nevado and La Parva, which lie at around 3,000 meters (nearly 10,000ft) in the municipality of Lo Barnechea, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of downtown Santiago.

Later that evening, on the windy, moon-lit car ride back to Santiago, I was reminded of a question I’d posed to Valenzuela when we first arrived. I’d asked her what, in her wildest dreams, this place might look like in a decade or two.

The path would snake from there toward Las Arenas Valley in the Cajón del Maipo, the city’s traditional outdoor playground, where another road leads into the Andes. Along the way, it would pass Cerro El Plomo (the largest peak visible from Santiago on a clear day at 5,434 meters; 17,830ft), as well as the El Yeso Dam and the Olivares Valley.

Andes Santiago has an initial grant from the regional government of 150 million Chilean pesos ($181,500) to study the route and formalize a project. “Our idea is to have shelters every four or five hours,” Le-Bert explained, adding that the goal is to build roughly 10 of them spread between about 2,000 meters and 3,700 meters in altitude (6,500ft to 12,000ft). “These would be small hotels in the mountain, like in Europe,” he added.

Ideas like this put Andes Santiago and Queremos Parque at odds with each other. Valenzuela is skeptical of real estate developments in the Andes, as well as members of the group’s executive committee, who represent interests that accept funds from extractive industries. Le-Bert, for his part, said he applauded the creation of a new national park, but since he works with government funding, cannot be “out on the streets” campaigning for causes.

Yet, the two sides do share common goals. “Very few people have been in the heart of the Andes [near Santiago] because it’s pretty hard to go there,” Le-Bert said. “There are a lot of private places that are hard to pass through, and what we want to do is to open those places up.”

When Valenzuela and I, having wrapped up our hike, prepared to head back to Santiago, a dozen huasos were in a dusty majada (corral) lassoing cattle for an earmarking ceremony. As we stopped in to say hello, the evening sun cast long shadows over the men’s wide-brimmed chupalla hats, before it drooped behind bald rocky peaks. Darkness soon engulfed the valley, and we lingered longer than expected to join a cookout, tossing back sweet tea and even sweeter red wine.

Members of the Ortega dynasty were all gathered around a fire, which flickered from a metal pit on the edge of a small wooden shelter. Nearby were the cots the family would sleep on later that evening. We talked about innocuous things: Dogs, hot dogs, the weather. Valenzuela barely brought up conservation. When she did, it was subtle: a story about ranchers in Patagonia who used to shoot pumas. Now, they make more money leading puma-spotting trips for moneyed jetsetters.

The Ortegas listened. They made jokes. At one point, an old man named Jesus accused Queremos Parque of plaguing the valley with rabbits, which leave the cattle with less feed. Then, the whole family laughed at the thought. Valenzuela laughed too. They seemed to enjoy each other’s company, wanting to see eye-to-eye—even if both sides knew, deep down, they might never get there.

Later that evening, on the windy, moon-lit car ride back to Santiago, I was reminded of a question I’d posed to Valenzuela when we first arrived. I’d asked her what, in her wildest dreams, this place might look like in a decade or two.

First, she told me to mentally erase the power lines from the hydroelectric plants. “Then, imagine a world festival of rock-climbing here,” she said, pointing to a sheer, 200-meter (650ft) cliff face. There would also be mountain biking paths and campgrounds and picnic areas for day trippers, as well as more restricted areas—perhaps near the high altitude bofedales (wetlands)—to rehabilitate the flora and fauna.

“The ranchers could be working at the entrance as guides and offering cultural experiences like traditional asados [Chilean barbecues],” she continued. “There could even be a cable car up to a restaurant, maybe La Linda Vista.” Diners might watch as pumas stalk guanacos in the valley below.

I told her that it sounded pretty idyllic.

She paused, yearnful, and looked at me.

“It does, doesn’t it?”

She was convinced that, until Santiago had something like this, something accessible to the masses, something truly wild, it could hardly consider itself a world capital of mountain tourism.

“Santiago without a proper national park,” she said, “is the capital of nothing.”