Latest Posts

For a number of years I have been travelling around Chile, documenting rural life and learning about my country’s many traditional cultures.  This April, I went to Lonquimay in Araucanía, just north of my home in Pucón, to photograph the annual Fiesta del Piñón. This festival celebrates the harvest of the pehuen (or piñón in […]

There are few things as completely Argentinian than the tango. It’s the dance that defines our national character, born out of the country’s immigrant experience in the first decades of the 20th Century. Sometimes it’s slow and sensual, and sometimes it snaps like a sharply turned heel. Either way, I love it.  Most visitors to […]

What do you do when your inflatable kayak gets a puncture while you’re crossing a lake strewn with icebergs, and you’re over a week’s overland travel from the nearest town? That was the challenge faced by explorer and environmentalist Charlie Tokely on his expedition to Lago Greve, one of the largest, most remote and least […]

We’ve long been in love with Patagonia’s extraordinary landscapes, but what keeps us coming back time after time are its people. The deep relationships that we’ve built with our friends and partners over the years in Chile and Argentina allow us to show travellers the very best of the region – and we always adore […]

Torres del Paine National Park is home to some of Chile’s most iconic sights. Any hiker or trekker will be instantly familiar with views of the immense granite Towers that give the park its name, and the wild crags of the Cuernos that sit on top of the Paine Massif. Put together and they’re a […]

For most people, Patagonia conjures up visions of endless mountains, with condors soaring down from the snowy peaks, endless plains of pampas grass, the blue glaciers of Tierra del Fuego or the Chilean Fjords. But there’s another side to this vast region that deserves to be better known: Patagonia’s Atlantic coast.   This is an area […]

In the late 1920s, sub-editors on the Times of London came up with a game to entertain themselves during tedious evening shifts. A prize was awarded to whoever wrote the dullest headline that made it into print. In his autobiography, journalist and novelist Claud Cockburn claimed to have won the competition on one occasion with […]

At Swoop, we don’t just talk about Patagonia all day – we live and breathe it. Our team travels regularly throughout the region, plus we have many Swoopers who live in both Chile and Argentina, from the Lakes in northern Patagonia right down to Puerto Natales close to Torres del Paine.  In the 2024/25 travel […]

Patagonia is a place where everything seems to be produced on the most epic scale. It’s a place of huge landscapes, impossible mountain ranges and plains of pampas that seem to stretch out to the horizon forever. It can feel like small measures don’t exist here.  But maybe they should. On previous trips in Patagonia […]

Most travellers’ experience of Tierra del Fuego starts and finishes in Ushuaia, Argentina’s southernmost city, that sits on a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the waters of the Beagle Channel. It’s a fine place to start a trek or catch an adventure cruise ship to Cape Horn or even Antarctica, as well […]

‘Patagonia!’, wrote the British aristocratic explorer Lady Florence Dixie in 1880. ‘Who would ever think about going to such a place? … Why, it is thousands of miles away, and no one has ever been there before, except Captain Musters, and one or two other adventurous madmen!’ Well, Lady Florence, Captain Musters—or to give him […]

I grew up in a bilingual household, speaking both English and Welsh and I’m very proud of my Welsh heritage, but I never realised, until I started working for Swoop Patagonia, that the connection my family home in north Wales had with Patagonia. It is a hidden history that I wasn’t taught at schools – […]

I’ve travelled the length and breadth of Patagonia, but Los Glaciares in Argentina has always been my favourite national park. I first backpacked here in 2002, then again a few years later when I did a mad cross-continental bike ride from Rio all the way south to Ushuaia at the very tip of South America. […]

Patagonia is home to some of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet, from thick temperate rainforests and wild steppe to fjord-crinkled coastlines and the great glacier-clad spine of the Andes Mountains that run along its entire length.  These aren’t just beautiful wilderness areas, ripe for exploration by adventurous travellers. A recent study has shown […]

Since 2023, Swoop has been a certified B Corp. It’s our deeply held belief that we have a responsibility to consider the planet in everything we do. We’re proud to be part of a movement committed to creating positive change in the world. Choosing to travel with a B Corp for your next adventure has […]

In March and April 2025, a cheerful scene has been playing out in Chacabuco Valley in the heart of Chile’s Aysen region. Dozens of baby birds, looking like stripy ducklings on stilts, peck happily in the dirt and grass, investigating their new home. They have been bred under the most careful supervision, and are getting […]

At Swoop Patagonia we’re obsessed with the ends of the Earth. Few things excite us more than the view of peak after snowy peak after climbing a stiff mountain pass. Or the release after holding your breath as you watch a puma pass by with her cubs, or a wind so bracing it cuts like […]

It’s a classic movie scene. Two children in a car huddle in terror. The ground shakes with the approach of something scary. We catch glimpses of the beast: a passing tail, an enormous clawed foot and a beady eye looking through the car’s rain-streaked window. As the tension builds, the camera finally pulls back as […]

The Andes Mountains are ancient. They’ve formed a rampart down the spine of South America for around 14 million years. In Chile, they’ve helped form landscapes as wildly diverse as the Atacama Desert on its high altitude plateau, the ragged and glacier-draped coastline of the Chilean Fjords, and of course the great granite peaks of […]

If you could bottle a country, what would it taste like? Ireland surely would taste of Guinness, Italy a shot of espresso, while a reassuring cup of tea would stand in for England. And Chile? Well, as the fourth biggest wine exporter in the world, the answer lies on the wine aisle of any supermarket. […]