At the far southern tip of South America in Chilean Patagonia, a new national park is taking shape at Cabo Froward on the Magellan Strait. In a project spearheaded by the conservation organisation Rewilding Chile along with Tompkins Conservation, it plans to be a national park with both terrestrial and marine habitats, where a newly-discovered population of rare huemul deer graze in forests overlooking the feeding grounds of migrating humpback whales.
At Swoop, we’re proud to have supported the creation of this national park through the Swoop Conservation Fund. I have just returned from joining the team from Rewilding Chile for a coastal hike to the gateway of the new park at San Isidro, to discover exactly what makes Cabo Froward so special – and to learn what role tourism might play in its future development and protection.
Beginning at the end of the road
Our hike began at Punta Arbol, at the end of a road which finished where a thick forest of coihue trees crowded its way onto a shingle beach. We were little more than an hour’s drive south from Punta Arenas, Chile’s gateway to southern Patagonia, but it already felt like the end of the world. A large sign reading ‘Fin de camino’ seemed to confirm it, though it was hard to make out the words through the collection of stickers left by overland travellers. At the southernmost road on mainland South America, and with nowhere left to go, it was no wonder they were so keen to make their mark.
The overlanders weren’t the first to do so. The region is crucial ancestral territory for the Kawésqar people, who once led a nomadic lifestyle along the Magellan Strait. On the drive in, we’d passed stone fish traps built by the Kawésqar, but their presence here wasn’t a historic one. There are still 18 Kawésqar communities living in the area, and Benjamín Cáceres, Rewilding Chile’s conservation coordinator for the region, explained how the Ministry of Environment is about lead a consultation process with the Kawésqar people on the Cabo Froward plans – an essential step before the national park is granted legal status.
Hiking the Magellan Strait
We were blessed on the hike by one of those gorgeous late Autumn days that Patagonia does so well, with warm sun and barely a breath of wind. The previous week I’d been surrounded by the raw granite beauty of Torres del Paine, but the landscape here was a completely different sort of wilderness.
On my left, the waters of the Magellan Strait lapped gently against the shore, and we stopped regularly to spot birds: cormorants, flightless steamer ducks, Magellanic oyster catchers and pairs of caranca, or kelp geese, in their starkly contrasting colours: the females with dark chocolate plumage and the males dressed in purest white. Occasionally, we even spotted black-browed albatrosses winging effortlessly in front of distant blue islands – sentinels of the Southern Ocean who reminded us that we were far closer to Antarctica than Chile’s capital city Santiago.
To my right, the spindly trunks of the coihue trees rose above us, often bent sharply against the weather to remind us that while today was calm, Patagonia’s winds are often truly unforgiving. At one point, a bright green flight of austral parakeets burst from the canopy with a screech. It was a slightly surreal moment: parrots on one side and albatrosses on the other. It was easy to understand why birdwatchers are so enamoured with the region.
As we walked, Maria José Garcia, one of Rewilding Chile’s philanthropy associates, pointed out that there were further secrets behind the trees. Of the nearly 1000,000 hectares that the national park is planned to encompass, around 53,000 are comprised of peat bogs – a vitally important carbon sink. Recent research has shown that these ecosystems actually absorb more carbon than the Amazon rainforest, making the protection of Cabo Froward even more important.
A lighthouse with a surprise
After four kilometres of hiking, often passing the trunks of bleached and storm-washed trees – the most impressive driftwood I’ve ever seen – we reached a small guesthouse on the shingle beach, and stopped to eat our boxed lunches on its deck. Benjamín, who had been coming here since he was 12, told me that it had been built by his conservationist father nearly 20 years ago.
The caretaker, Artur, appeared to tell us that if we’d been here a week earlier we would have seen a breaching humpback whale while we ate. His might have been a lonely job – working 20 days straight followed by eight days off in Punta Arenas, but the wildlife felt like good compensation.
After lunch, a short walk through the trees behind the guesthouse led us to the final goal of our hike. We broke out of the trees onto a narrow isthmus which ended in a low hill. On its summit were the unmistakable red and white stripes of the San Isidro lighthouse. The sight of it gave us a new energy, and we bounded our way up to its doors, where Benjamín was already waiting with the key.
I’ve been in a lot of lighthouses in my time, but what was waiting for me inside was a complete surprise. I expected some rusting machinery perhaps, or some old photos showing how it had been built 120 years ago to help ships navigate the strait. What I didn’t expect was the complete skeleton of a humpback whale laid out in the hall. It was just a few years old, from an individual that had been stranded nearby, and its jawbones were still weeping with oil, giving the room a dark resinous smell. ‘Don’t touch it!’ warned Benjamín, telling me that he’d learned the hard way that whale oil is nearly impossible to get off your clothes.
There were more traces of the whale’s brethren in a side room – with models of whaling ships and bones mounted artfully on the wall. Benjamín explained that just over a century ago a Chilean-Norwegian company set up a whaling station in a nearby bay, and the bones had been reclaimed from the seabed by his scuba-diving brother during an underwater archaeological survey of the remains of the whaling station. While all visible traces of the station had long been removed, he said that if you knew where to look in the right season, you can find yellow raspberries growing where the Scandinavians had lived and worked.
A protected future
The long walk back offered plenty of time for reflection – both on the history of whaling and the future where all the marine life in Cabo Froward would be protected. I was even more thrilled when we spotted an austral dolphin tantalisingly close to the shore. The tide was coming in, and though we were never in danger of being cut off, at several points we had to scramble through the trees to avoid joining our dolphin friend and getting our feet wet.
It’s the tides however that will play a role in how tourism will be developed here. The hike to San Isidro was just a taste of the edge of the national park. The true excitement, the Rewilding Chile team assured me, lay further along the coast, on a four day hike to Cruz de los Mares. This is a 24-metre high cross standing sentinel on the southernmost tip of mainland South America: Cabo Froward itself. West of this point, in the mountains at Bahía Cordes and Port Gallant, Rewilding Chile had set camera traps that recorded a new subpopulation huemul deer, the southernmost of its whole distribution.
While our beach hike had been a gentle affair, this wilderness trek to Cruz de los Mares is a completely different beast. There are no marked trails here, just pathfinding through truly wild country. With at least half a dozen tidal rivers to ford, careful knowledge of the tides is also essential for safe navigation. But once the final paperwork for the new park is finally signed off, it’s hoped that the first groups of adventurous trekkers will be able explore this new frontier – possibly with a support boat in tow. For those who do, the experience is likely to be truly unique.
Rejoining our vehicles at the carpark at the end of the world, I noted that one of the Rewilding Chile 4WDs had an outsized picture of a huemul deer on its side. It was to be my only sighting of this elusive animal on my trip – but the establishment of this new national park meant that their future was being secured in this part of Patagonia. And the moment we drove off, I knew that one day I’d want to grab a tide timetable for the Magellan Strait and head back into this remarkable wilderness and see one for real.
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