As a travel company with deep roots in Patagonia, we often ask ourselves how we can be better guardians of the places we love. The answer often lies with the partners we work with closely across the region. One of these is Hotel Las Torres in Torres del Paine, which has one of the most incredible locations in all Patagonia, at the entrance to the Base of the Towers hike – the climax of the celebrated W Trek.
On a recent visit to Torres del Paine, I met with Juan López Contreras, Sales & Marketing Director of Hotel Las Torres, to talk about overtourism, how bad hiking trails can cause ecological damage to fragile ecosystems, and how they’ve invested in sustainable tourism to protect this precious destination for future generations.
How cattle helped shape Torres del Paine
The story of Hotel Las Torres starts long before the granite spires of the Paine Massif started to appear on any tourist itinerary. When Torres del Paine National Park was first established nearly 70 years ago, it was much smaller than today, and was centred around Lago Pehoé. Most of the remaining land was given over to private livestock ranching. This included the area around the Paine Massif and the three valleys that now make up the route of the W Trek. The trails that now draw hikers from around the world were first broken by gauchos on horseback, driving their cattle to fresh pasture.
This area was part of the Cerro Paine ranch, but as the boundaries of the national park slowly expanded, the ranch – including the land now occupied by Hotel Las Torres – became entirely surrounded.
In 1992, as tourism to Patagonia started to expand, the owners of the ranch, the Kusanovic family, decided to invest in this new interest in Torres del Paine. Hostería Las Torres, which had just a handful of rooms, was built at the entrance to what was to become the Base of the Towers hike. Within a few years, several refugios for hikers were added, including Refugio Central, Refugio Chileno further along the trail, and Refugio Francés in French Valley. The W Trek as we know it today was on its way to becoming one of the most popular hiking routes in South America – second only to the Inca Trail in Peru.
In time, the family recognised that preserving the area for tourism and conservation was a more valuable and sustainable long-term land use than livestock farming, and the decision was made to remove all livestock from the land. With the land no longer being grazed by cattle or roamed over by gauchos, the area’s natural flora began to flourish again. But the generations of livestock left behind one permanent feature: the paths beaten through the landscape by cows and horses. When there were only a few tourists coming to the park, this wasn’t much of a problem, but as Torres del Paine has grown in popularity, it’s increasingly been understood that what makes a good path for a cow doesn’t necessarily make a good path for a hiker – or the landscape they’re walking through.
Guardians of the Base of the Towers hike
Torres del Paine’s history explains why access to some of its centrepiece activities – the Base of the Towers hike and French Valley – are privately owned within a state-run national park. This puts Hotel Las Torres in a unique position as guardians of these trails. It’s a responsibility they take very seriously, as Juan López explained to me.
‘The Kusanovic family realised that no one else could look after the land, and decided to take away all the cattle and other non-endemic animals. In 2004, we created the NGO Las Torres Patagonia Conservancy as a way to formalise the conservation work that we wanted to do here.’
In the two decades since then, the Las Torres Patagonia Conservancy has become a leading voice for protecting the national park. Funded by Las Torres Patagonia, it works in conservation and reforestation, as well as research and environmental education.
Las Torres Patagonia manages the land – including the trails on the W Trek – as part of its own private reserve. Because of Torres del Paine’s unique mix of public and private land, can’t do this in isolation. As well as working with CONAF, Chile’s national park authorities, all its work is in line with the aims of a wider a conservation plan for the entire Torres del Paine Biosphere – an area that stretches all the way to the Argentinian border – that was drawn up in 2024 by the international conservation organisation Nature Conservancy.
In the last few years, Las Torres Patagonia Conservancy has turned its hands to an issue on the hotel’s own doorstep: the increasing popularity of the Base of the Towers hike, and how the trail can be protected.
‘We can get up to a thousand trekkers a day,’ says Juan López. ‘Not every day yet, but from January to March we’ll get that many people. That means we need to control the carrying capacity of the trail – the impact that visitors can create on the soils, on the trails, and with their waste’.
Las Torres Patagonia and the Conservancy have been working with CONAF to discuss the idea of capping the number of people who can hike to the Base of the Towers every day. Nothing has been agreed yet, but a total of 1400 hikers a day is one number that might be under consideration.
‘With all our respect to Machu Picchu, we don’t want Torres del Paine to be like that or become another Everest Base Camp Trail’ he says. ‘We really want to look after the land carefully.’ While the Base of the Towers still receives less than a quarter of the Inca Trail’s 4500 daily hikers, it’s clear that there’s concern that the impact of even today’s numbers of visitors needs to be carefully managed. The way that Hotel Las Torres and the Conservancy are doing that is to rethink from scratch what the trail should actually look like.
How to build a sustainable hiking trail
‘There has been no trail design until now,’ Juan López tells me. ‘Everything evolved naturally from the cattle moving around.’
Trails that are good for cows aren’t necessarily good for hikers or the environment. The results can be seen along several parts of the Base of the Towers hike, or parts of the park where people arrive for day hiking to some of the most popular viewpoints. The most common are the bottlenecks that are too narrow for hikers to pass in both directions. More destructive are sections where there is no natural drainage. Standing water after rains can tempt hikers to leave the trail and make their own path, trampling native plants in the process. This can be a particular problem when people are doing a self-guided hike and don’t have a guide with them to explain the impact of their actions.
In contrast, a well-designed and built trail is an opportunity to create a long-term relationship between humans and nature. It’s a science as much as an art, and involves surveying topography, then working with the terrain to avoid unnecessary cutting of vegetation to create paths with gradients that allow for drainage but don’t leave the ground prone to erosion. Smart trail design takes into account control points for hikers – keeping the best viewpoints while cutting off desire lines that might tempt a walker to leave the path for another view or shortcut. Crucially for the Base of the Towers hike, a good trail allows a clear flow of hikers in both directions.
‘We’ve been working with Conservation VIP for seven years on rebuilding the trail, Juan López Tells me. They’re an NGO from the USA who send rangers south to Torres del Paine when the American national parks they work in are shut for the northern hemisphere winter (in 2024 Swoop worked with Conservation VIP to rebuild Las Guardas bridge on the O Circuit when it was damaged by winter storms).
Conservation VIP helped Las Torres Patagonia Conservancy design a new trail that moves well through the environment, avoids damaging the surrounding flora and – for the first time – is constructed with international standards of width and slopes. Volunteers have carried out the physical work over the last few seasons.
A bridge to the future
The Base of the Towers hike is about a 22 km (13.7 mile) round trip, and the first new section that covers 3.3 km (2 miles) was opened to hikers in March 2026. A further 6.5 km (4 km) has been completed, but are awaiting the construction of three new bridges crossing the Ascencio river before hikers can start using them.
‘This is the main stone in our shoes, because each bridge costs around US$1 million, Juan López, nodding to engineering challenges of working in an area where construction logistics are tough, ‘But I believe we’re going to see the light this year with funding. If that comes into place, then in three years’ time we’ll have the bridges in place.’
In the first hour of the trail, where the landscape starts its slow ascent and the path begins to narrow, the issue immediately becomes apparent. The existing bridge only allows one person to cross at a time, making long queues a regular phenomenon – and when people queue, there’s the temptation to turn the wait into a break stop and wander off the trail to find somewhere untouched to sit down.
‘Because Hotel Las Torres is just inside the trail entrance, we can manage our guests to be away from the crowds, but when groups of other hikers arrive in vans at the same time, the infrastructure isn’t enough,’ says Juan López. ‘People think that Torres del Paine is collapsing just because of the poor flow.’
The new trail and its bridges offer Hotel Las Torres a roadmap for protecting the Base of the Towers hike for the generations to come, while giving visitors the chance to be inspired by the epic nature of the landscape.
‘This isn’t a mass tourist destination,’ he concludes. ‘People come here to be in nature, not to be in New York.’
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