{"id":470838,"date":"2025-12-25T13:41:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T13:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/470838\/"},"modified":"2025-12-25T13:41:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T13:41:16","slug":"its-the-wildest-place-i-have-walked-new-national-park-will-join-up-chiles-2800km-wildlife-corridor-chile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/470838\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s the wildest place I have walked\u2019: new national park will join up Chile\u2019s 2,800km wildlife corridor | Chile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chile\u2019s government is poised to create the country\u2019s 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of pristine wilderness and completing a wildlife corridor<\/a> stretching 1,700 miles (2,800km) to the southernmost tip of the Americas.<\/p>\n

The Cape Froward national park is a wild expanse of wind-torn coastline and forested valleys that harbours unrivalled biodiversity and has played host to millennia of human history.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have been to many exceptional places, and I can tell you that the Cape Froward project is the wildest place I have walked through,\u201d said Kristine Tompkins, the renowned US conservationist at the heart of the project. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the few truly wild forest and peak territories left in the country, and the richness of the Indigenous history in the region makes a case for these territories to be preserved for all time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coastline near the former San Isidro lighthouse, which is being converted into a museum. Photograph: Pablo Sanhueza\/Reuters<\/p>\n

It is the 17th national park created or expanded in Chile and Argentina by Tompkins Conservation and its successor organisation, Rewilding Chile. The groups have spent the best part of a decade knitting together a patchwork of land purchases and state-held properties<\/a> to create the park.<\/p>\n

In 2023, they signed an agreement with the Chilean government to donate the land to become Cape Froward national park.<\/p>\n

In February, a population of 10 huemul, an endangered deer species, was found in the park, and a network of cameras regularly captures wild pumas and the endangered huill\u00edn, a river otter. The area also encompasses 10,000 hectares of sphagnum bogs, a spongelike moss which stores carbon deep below the ground.<\/p>\n

A waterfall in the strait of Magellan, which links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Photograph: Pablo Sanhueza\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Benjam\u00edn C\u00e1ceres, the conservation coordinator in the Magallanes region for Rewilding<\/a> Chile, is a native of Patagonia who first visited Cape Froward at the age of 12 with his conservationist father, Patricio C\u00e1ceres.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father was always a dreamer,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen he found out about an abandoned lighthouse all those years ago, he brought us here as a family to dream with him \u2013 and that\u2019s where this story began for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The San Isidro lighthouse is one of seven designed and built by the Scottish architect George Slight along the treacherous strait of Magellan. It was abandoned in the 1970s and itinerant fishers would come by to salvage wood until the roof collapsed.<\/p>\n

Now, Patricio and Benjam\u00edn\u2019s vision for the restored lighthouse is becoming a reality. It has been converted into a museum of the natural and human history of the area and \u2013 together with a cafe on the beach below \u2013 will become the entry point for the new national park.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Garrido, project coordinator for the Rewilding Foundation, which secured the land for the Cape Froward project. Photograph: Pablo Sanhueza\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Dotted along the shoreline are delicate archaeological sites that enshrine the history of the Kaw\u00e9sqar, a nomadic Indigenous people who navigated fjords, rocky beaches and forests in canoes carved from trees.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis mosaic of ecosystems is tremendously important,\u201d said C\u00e1ceres. \u201cThe bogs and subantarctic forests are incredibly fragile, and the cultural legacy of the Kaw\u00e9sqar territory, the era of explorers, then whalers; all of this history and biodiversity will be preserved in some form in the future national park.\u201d<\/p>\n

In among shells buried in silty mud at Kaw\u00e9sqar campsites are bird and dolphin bones from feasts. There are even circles of stones set out as fish traps on the beaches, and trees stripped of their bark to line the hulls of Kaw\u00e9sqar canoes.<\/p>\n

The southern Chilean coastline is dotted with archaeological sites that tell the history of the Kaw\u00e9sqar people. Photograph: Pablo Sanhueza\/Reuters<\/p>\n

\u201cThe area was widely inhabited by nomadic canoeists who lived by fishing and gathering food,\u201d said Leticia Caro, a Kaw\u00e9sqar activist who belongs to the N\u00f3mades del Mar community. \u201cFor our community, it is very important to protect this area, where you can also see the different ways of inhabiting the land and seas, and the interaction with other peoples like the Yag\u00e1n, Selknam and Tehuelche.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Long after Indigenous communities had settled in the area, the waters of the strait of Magellan, which the Kaw\u00e9sqar call the tawokser chams, became the link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Charles Darwin stepped off the Beagle to climb nearby Mount Tarn on his voyage along the coast of Chile and the strait was one of the world\u2019s most important shipping routes until the Panama canal opened in 1914.<\/p>\n

The murky depths have claimed many lives and spawned legends. Treasure troves lie in the depths, and sealed bottles of rum have washed ashore over the centuries.<\/p>\n

Timber from the forests has been taken as far afield as the Falkland Islands and Buenos Aires for construction and, in 1905, the Magallanes Whaling Society was formed. Eleven years later, with the whale population decimated, an auction was held to sell off the society\u2019s land and equipment.<\/p>\n

All that is left at Bah\u00eda el \u00c1guila, where the carcasses were processed, is the footprint of the factory and a few rotting wooden stumps. Adolf Andresen, the society\u2019s Norwegian founder, died poor and forgotten in the saloon bars of Punta Arenas in 1940.<\/p>\n

The forest covered by the Cape Froward project is home to endangered deer and otter species as well as wild pumas. Photograph: Pablo Sanhueza\/Reuters<\/p>\n

But there are still a number of steps before the national park officially comes into existence.<\/p>\n

An Indigenous consultation process, a legal requirement for large-scale projects in Chile, was held in September but fell flat. Chile\u2019s environment ministry said it would make \u201cevery effort\u201d to advance with plans for the park by March.<\/p>\n

But if no progress is made after two years, the lands revert to the ownership of Tompkins\u2019 organisations.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach of the park projects we have developed has specific reasons for being considered essential for conservation,\u201d said Tompkins, who was the chief executive of Patagonia outdoor clothing for 20 years until 1993. \u201cAnd in this sense Cape Froward is a piece of an ecological puzzle that, over time, should ensure that key biodiversity sites within Chilean Patagonia are permanently protected.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Guardian\u2019s reporting was supported by Rewilding Chile<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chile\u2019s government is poised to create the country\u2019s 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":470839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[50,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-470838","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115780497698483700","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}