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This is thanks in large part to Douglas Tompkins,
the American founder of the North Face,
and his wife, Kristine, former CEO of Patagonia.
Before Douglas’s death in 2015, they purchased
more than 7 million acres of wilderness in Aysén,
then donated it to Chile to create a series of
national parks. Most visitors have tended to be
determined adventurers like the cyclists we
saw on the road, juddering up and down the
mountains with tents on their backs. But,
as we discovered, Aysén also caters to those of
us who prefer the comforts of handsomely
appointed hotels.
that threads its way for almost 800 miles
through southern Chile. Running between the
towns of Puerto Montt and Villa O’Higgins,
the Carretera takes you through Aysén, a little-
visited region of Patagonia sandwiched between
two popular ones: the Lake District above and
Torres del Paine National Park below. When
the poet Pablo Neruda wrote that “at the end of
Chile the planet breaks,” he must have had in
mind the fractured landscapes of Aysén: more
than 41,000 square miles of mountains, lakes,
glaciers, fjords, and archipelagoes.
Until the 1970s, there was no road that led
here. The only way in or out was by boat,
navigating inland from the Pacific through a
tangle of rivers. That began to change when
General Augusto Pinochet decided to build the
Carretera, out of fear that neighboring Argentina
would lay claim to a region so isolated that it
was only loosely incorporated into Chile. The
highway was completed in 2003 and remains
the only route through the region; most of it is
still unpaved. All this helps to explain why today
Aysén is the least populated part of Chile. There
are only 2.5 people per square mile—about the
same population density as Mongolia.
It also explains why relatively few people
come here. But recently, the things that make
life so difficult in Aysén—the geography,
the impossibility of finding a phone signal—
have started attracting visitors. Chileans with
disposable cash are building summer houses,
and international travelers are coming, too.
TAL0620_F_AysenChile.indd 75 FINAL 4/21/20 8:18 PM
joyce
(Joyce)
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