conservationists Kris and Douglas Tompkins
bought the San Alonso estate; three years later
they acquired the 12,000-hectare Rincón
estancia. They removed fences and cattle from
across the properties, allowed the land to revert
to its natural state, and remade the ranch
houses as upmarket accommodations.
I met Kris Tompkins on the Rincón estancia,
where she and Douglas had built a house that
they could live in a few months each year. With
its polished woods and pale fabrics, book-lined
shelves and black-and-white photographs, the
place has a relaxed, Californian vibe. Kris, a
small, intense woman in her sixties, had the
energy of someone half her age. As the dazzling
light of the wetlands poured in through tall
windows, she curled her legs beneath her on the
sofa and told me about her conservation work
with Doug in Chile and Argentina.
The Tompkinses started their formidable
double act in conservation almost 30 years ago.
Beginning in the late 1980s, they extricated
themselves from their businesses (Doug had
founded the North Face and Esprit, while Kris
was the CEO of Patagonia) to devote themselves
to buying and protecting large tracts of land in
both Chile and Argentina, with the goal of
handing them back to their respective
governments as parks.Initially the fact that gringos were buying
up huge swaths of the countryside was met
locally with a great deal of suspicion. But the
Conservation Land Trust and Tompkins
Conservation—the entities they founded to
administer the projects—slowly won people
over. At the beginning of 2019, the organization
gave more than 400,000 hectares to the Chilean
government to create Pumalín Douglas
Tompkins and Patagonia National Parks. In
Corrientes, Doug sued a firm that had illegally
brought thousands of cattle onto the reserve,
and committed to adding the Conservation
Land Trust’s extensive holdings to the
parklands of Iberá.
Doug did not live to see the trust’s most
recent successes. In December 2015, he died in a
kayaking accident on Chile’s Lago General
Carrera, though Kris has continued their
conservation work.
“I hope we have helped to cha nge t he
mentality here,” she told me, “to encourage
local people to see that conservation is not just
the right thing to do, but that it can offer
economic opportunities. And tourism is central
to that. Managed well, the benefits can spread
to everyone.”FROM RINCÓN I had flown to San Alonso,
another Tompkins property, where I discussed
the neighbors with Maita, the Spanish biologist.
The trip was a 15-minute hop in a single-engine
plane, which landed on a grass airstrip by the
old estancia buildings. If Rincón was a stylishly
refurbished colonial ranch, San Alonso felt like
a home—as if the original owners, a Spanish
family of several generations, had gone away
and left me the keys. Part of the charm was its
isolation: you can only get there by small plane
or boat. San Alonso’s stillness seeped into my
being. The only sound was the dry rustle of
reedbeds at the end of the lawns, the only
movement the blossoms drifting down from
the lapacho trees to become a pink carpet
across the grass.
The estancia’s isolation is part of the reason
it has become one of the headquarters for the
Conservation Land Trust’s rewilding efforts in
Iberá. These have been overseen by Maita, who
I first encountered working in a narrow office
in one of the estancia buildings. She explained
the species depletion in Iberá—how the
mariscadores had poled their flat-bottomed
punts through the water in search of meat and
furs, hunting anteaters, capybaras and giant
otters. And how the ranchers, trying to protect
their livestock, had put a price on the heads of
jaguars, which had begun to attack sheep as the
marsh deer numbers declined.A gaucho at the
Estancia San Juan
de Poriahú.
OPPOSITE:
Ranchers round up
cattle on an
estancia outside
Concepción.