Latest Posts

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. […]

Before I moved to Chile, I had never really given the stars much thought. I grew up in the middle of England, where the skies were either grey because of rain clouds or glowed orange at night thanks to sodium street lamps. I knew the same small handful of constellations that everyone else did and […]

Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina can feel like the last outpost of civilization. It’s somewhere that’s always embraced that image: tourist slogans reading ‘fin del mundo’ are everywhere, alongside street art showing convicts in stripy prison uniforms, remembering when this part of Tierra del Fuego was somewhere you were once sent as a […]

A road trip is one of the great dreams of travel. It’s no wonder that time and again songwriters have returned to the idea of a car and a highway that stretches on forever as the ultimate promise of freedom. Bruce Springsteen practically built a career on the idea, and everyone knows that Route 66 […]

I’ve always loved horses. Ever since I was little, I’ve felt a deep connection to them. Growing up in a city didn’t provide much opportunity to ride or even be around them. My grandmother’s brothers kept horses, but women weren’t allowed to ride them, let alone little girls. There was still a part of me […]

Anticipation is an underrated aspect of travel. There’s so much pleasure that goes into planning a trip and looking forward to what you’ll do when you get there, from studying your  itinerary to putting together a packing list. For me, that’s only heightened when you’re going on a trek, where the journey is as much […]

The coastline of Chilean Patagonia is crinkly edged. The Andes Mountains begin their slow eruption for the sea here, leaving behind them a steep-sided landscape punctuated by some of the world’s most spectacular fjords. It’s a perfect landscape when seen from the water on an expedition cruise or by kayak, but until relatively recently little […]

Birdwatching can take you to some unexpected places. I come from a family of birdwatchers and we’ve travelled the world with it, from the cloudforests of Costa Rica and the Australian Outback to the green hills of Sri Lanka. My most recent birdwatching experience was on an Antarctic expedition cruise, where icebergs offered a beautiful […]

Patagonia is somewhere that’s synonymous with adventure. It’s about rugged landscapes, snowy mountains, and a great untamed wilderness. It’s why we love it. But one question we often get asked at Swoop is how safe is Patagonia for a solo female traveller? Well, as just that – a solo female who has spent over 18 […]

The map of Tierra del Fuego is littered with so many sad place names that you’re often left feeling that its first European visitors just weren’t having a very good time. Places like Disappointment Bay, Port Famine and the Gulf of Sorrows hardly offered encouragement to potential colonists – and even today a traveller might […]

If you visit one region on your trip to Patagonia, it will almost certainly be Torres del Paine National Park. Located in southern Chile, Torres del Paine is the crown jewel and hiking hub of Patagonia. Its iconic landscape is a quintessential postcard view, the image you conjure when your mind hears the word ‘Patagonia’: […]

Torres del Paine National Park is full of truly extraordinary landscapes, from its immense granite towers to the hulking mass of the Paine Massif itself. But in six seasons of working in the park as a guide and hiking the W Trek more times than I care to remember, there was one place that I […]