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culture: the long communal dining
table is like a stretch of boardwalk,
and the whole place has the feel of
a tree house, only with Eames rocking
chairs in every room.
One day we took a boat trip with
a taciturn man named Rubén Flores,
whose wife, Valeria Landeros, owns
a hostel in the village and makes
delicious calzones rotos, a kind of
Chilean doughnut. We puttered up a
green channel lined with overhanging
trees, skirting islands of marsh grass
where wading birds nosed around
for snacks. We were headed for La Isla
de los Muertos—the island of the
dead. Several decades ago, a group
of graves marked by lichen-covered
wooden crosses was discovered on
this forested dot of land. Their
origins were mysterious, so the
mayor of Tortel called in Mena, the
archaeologist, to excavate the site.
Mena found 33 wooden coffins and
began to investigate who was buried
in them. The cemetery, it turned out,
dated back to 1906, before Aysén had
been permanently settled. The graves
belonged to a group of loggers who
were brought here from the island of
Chiloé to harvest wood. Their only
connection to the outside world was
a boat that would visit twice a year
with food. It’s likely that during one
passage to Tortel, the boat sank. It is
likely the workers starved to death.
From those difficult beginnings,
Tortel has grown into a place that
seems to have been taken from the
pages of a fairy tale. Early the next
morning, Charlie and I took a walk
around the bay. Mist was hanging
over the water and woodsmoke was
drifting from the chimneys. A dog
trotted alongside us, patrolling the
boardwalks, and a couple of early
risers unloaded bundles of wood
from boats roped to the jetties.
We stopped and leaned against the
railing and looked at the village
crawling up the hills. The arrival of
the Carretera Austral may yet change
Tortel, but that morning, as the
sun began to burn through the haze,
it was still, silent, and timeless.
their vaulted ceilings and sinuous
pillars, we realized why they are
nicknamed the chapel and the
cathedral. According to our guide,
Emilio Poblete, the chapel has
been officially consecrated by the
Catholic church.
The next day we came face to
face with the last remnants of the
ancient ice cap. A 50-minute drive
from Puerto Río Tranquilo is the
Exploradores Glacier, which lies on
the fringe of one of two ice fields in
Aysén that have persisted since the
ice age. Led by Poblete, we trekked
through the forest to the moraine left
at the head of the glacier—a chaos of
rocks, some the size of fists, others the
size of houses, that have been chewed
up and spat out by the glacier’s
progress across the landscape.
Gradually the rocks became finer
and the ice whiter, until we strapped
on crampons and hiked right onto
the glacier, its surface undulating like
a frozen sea. As we walked, we passed
pools of electric blue and crevasses
that plunge more than 300 feet to the
bottom of the glacier. We squeezed
ourselves into tunnels and hollows
formed by years of flowing meltwater
and put our ears to the surface to
listen for the “devil’s whip,” the loud
crack that results whenever a piece of
it breaks. Peering into the ice, we
could see tiny bubbles of prehistoric
air trapped inside.
BY NOW WE were approaching the
southern reaches of Aysén, where
the road tracks the course of the
Baker River. The mountains here are
dry and scrubby, the river a ribbon of
shocking cobalt running through
them. This is gaucho country, and as
we drove, we sped past men on
horseback, their traditional berets
shading their tanned, leathery faces.
We saw the occasional cow or
horse snacking on rose hips from
roadside bushes.
Eventually the land became
flatter, greener, softer. The river,
now a deep emerald, had slowed to
a broad meander, and everything
around us felt languid and sleepy.
We were on our way to Tortel, a
village on the Baker River delta. The
road got here only in 2003—before
that you had to take a boat.
Tortel’s relationship to the water
has created a unique way of life.
The first settlers to inhabit the delta
tried to farm cattle, but the sodden
ground couldn’t support the animals.
Instead they cultivated cypress trees,
transforming their wood into pylons
and fence posts, which would be
collected by a naval boat and taken
to Punta Arenas, on Chile’s southern
tip, to be sold. The village developed
around this informal port, and the
villagers, whose houses were widely
spread out, constructed wooden
pathways to reach one another
without having to row across the
bay. Today the village is an elaborate
cat’s cradle of boardwalks on stilts
that run up and down its slopes.
At the top of a steep flight of
mossy steps is the Entre Hielos Lodge,
a chic little place run by María Paz
Hargreaves. She was an architecture
student in Santiago when she first
came to Tortel as a tourist, and had
never seen anything like it. Before she
graduated, she wrote a thesis on the
village’s unique system of boardwalks
and then, drawn by the romance of
this out-of-the-way spot, she came
to live here. “I felt this was my place,”
she told me.
In 2008 she bought a building high
on a hill, up in the tree canopy, then
gutted it and remodeled it into a
boutique hotel. The interior takes its
inspiration from Tortel’s logging
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