Each visit to Chile is a kind of homecoming. On previous trips to Santiago, Valparaíso, Puerto Montt, and small towns and villages, I connected with my family’s heritage through community, art, contemporary and traditional dance, and visits to boisterous fish markets. Last spring, I took a different approach: a five-day exploration of Chilean Patagonia’s wilderness. My home base was Eleven Rio Palena Lodge, a seven-room luxury retreat set deep in the Andes Mountains.
Eleven Rio’s guides tailor experiences based on each guest’s interests. For me, that meant white-water rafting down the Futaleufú River, hiking to the Salto El Tronador waterfall, learning to fly-fish with an experienced angler, and cliff-jumping into glacial pools. In the evenings, I relaxed at the lodge, soaking in outdoor wooden hot tubs and drinking maté-infused cocktails in front of the fireplace.
Still, it was the quiet enormity that moved me most. With turquoise lakes, ancient Valdivian rainforest, and granite peaks, the continent’s southernmost landscapes are largely roadless; thousands of miles of unmapped wonders remain. The untamed vastness reminded me of my Chilean mother’s stories. When I was a child, she told me that during the world’s creation, Chile was cobbled together with the leftover scraps stuck onto the side of what’s now South America. As a result, the country has a piece of everything: desert, glaciers, forest, mountains, and beaches. The environment formed natural barriers too difficult for humans to easily cross—the world’s driest desert to the north, the perilous Drake Passage to the south, towering mountains to the east, the Pacific Ocean to the west—so fewer people came to inhabit Patagonia.
On my last day, that legend came to mind as we descended by helicopter to what the guides had nicknamed Cathedral Lake. As I sipped wine and snacked on vanilla-scented chaura berries along the shore, I thought about the Mapuche people—the country’s largest Indigenous group, who call central and southern Chile “Wallmapu.” I wondered what they might have named these waters, if they were even able to reach here at all. I wondered, too, who might come next and how long this remoteness might last. Maybe I’ll never know, and perhaps that’s what keeps a place like this feeling wild.
