Category: Epic Adventures

It’s been 25 years since I first travelled to Patagonia and had my heart captured by its amazing wild landscapes. When I founded Swoop 10 years later, the region was on the cusp of change, with increasing tourist numbers and many of the challenges that can bring to both the environment and local communities.  I […]

‘Eat locally and eat seasonally’ is what people say when they’re recommending healthy meals that have a low impact on the planet. It’s a great aspiration, but one that’s not always simple to stick to with a busy lifestyle. When the convenience of a supermarket or home delivery is there, sometimes it’s easier to eat […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]