‘It’s the wildest place I have walked’: new national park will join up Chile’s 2,800km wildlife corridor | Chile

The Chilean government is preparing to create the country’s 47th national park, which would protect nearly 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of untouched wilderness and complete a wildlife corridor stretching 1,700 miles (2,800 km) to the southernmost tip of the Americas.

Cape Froward national park is a wilderness of wind-torn coastline and forested valleys, harboring unrivaled biodiversity and home to thousands of years of human history.

“I’ve been to many exceptional places, and I can tell you that the Cape Froward project is the craziest place I’ve ever been through,” said Kristine Tompkins, the renowned US conservationist at the heart of the project. “It is one of the few remaining true forest and peak regions in the country, and the richness of Indigenous history in the region demonstrates that these areas should always be protected.”

It is the 17th national park in Chile and Argentina to be created or expanded by Tompkins Conservation and its successor organization, Rewilding Chile. The groups spent the better part of a decade assembling a mix of land purchases and state-owned properties to create the park.

In 2023, they signed an agreement with the Chilean government to donate the land to become Cape Froward national park.

A population of 10 huemul, an endangered species of deer, was found in the park in February, and a camera network regularly captures wild pumas and huillín, an endangered river otter. The region also includes 10,000 hectares of sphagnum swamp, a spongy moss that stores carbon deep underground.

Benjamín Cáceres, conservation coordinator in the Magallanes region for Rewilding Chile, is a Patagonian native who first visited Cape Froward with his conservationist father, Patricio Cáceres, when he was 12 years old.

“My father was always a dreamer,” he said. “When he found out about an abandoned lighthouse years ago, he brought us here as a family to dream with him, and that’s where this story began for me.”

San Isidro lighthouse is one of seven lighthouses designed and built by Scottish architect George Slight along the treacherous strait of Magellan. It was abandoned in the 1970s and wandering fishermen came here to salvage wood until its roof collapsed.

Now Patricio and Benjamín’s vision of the restored lighthouse is becoming a reality. It has been transformed into a museum chronicling the natural and human history of the area and will be the entry point to the new national park, along with a cafe on the beach below.

The coastline is dotted with sensitive archaeological sites that enshrine the history of the Kawésqar, a nomadic indigenous people who navigated fjords, rocky beaches and forests in canoes carved from trees.

“This mosaic of ecosystems is extremely important,” Cáceres said. “The swamps and sub-antarctic forests are incredibly fragile, and the cultural heritage of the Kawésqar region, the era of explorers and whalers – all this history and biodiversity will be preserved in some form in the future national park.”

Among the seashells buried in the alluvial mud at the Kawésqar campsites, there are bird and dolphin bones from feasts. There are even stone rings placed on beaches as fish traps, and trees stripped of bark to cover the hulls of Kawésqar canoes.

“The area was heavily populated by nomadic canoeists who made a living by fishing and foraging,” said Leticia Caro, a Kawésqar activist from the Nómades del Mar community. “It is very important for our community to preserve this area, where you can also see different ways of living on land and sea, and interaction with other peoples such as the Yagán, Selknam and Tehuelche.”

Long after indigenous communities settled the area, the waters of the Strait of Magellan, which Kawésqar calls the “Strait of Magellan”, emerged. tawokser chamsIt became the link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Charles Darwin disembarked from the Beagle He set out to climb nearby Mount Tarn on his journey along the Chilean coast, and the strait was one of the world’s most important shipping routes until the Panama Canal opened in 1914.

The dark depths claimed many lives and gave birth to legends. Treasure troves lie deep within, and sealed bottles of rum have washed ashore for centuries.

Timber from the forests was taken as far as the Falkland Islands and Buenos Aires for construction, and in 1905 the Magallanes Whaling Society was founded. Eleven years later, with the whale population declining, an auction was held to sell the association’s land and equipment.

In Bahía el Águila, where the carcasses were processed, all that remains is the footprint of the factory and a few rotting wooden logs. The association’s Norwegian founder, Adolf Andresen, died poor and forgotten in the bars of Punta Arenas in 1940.

But there are still a few steps left before the national park is officially revealed.

An Indigenous consultation process, a legal requirement for large-scale projects in Chile, was conducted in September but failed. Chile’s environment ministry said it would make “every effort” to advance park plans by March.

However, if no progress is made after two years, the lands will become the property of Tompkins’ organizations.

“Each of the park projects we have developed have specific reasons why they are deemed necessary from a conservation standpoint,” said Tompkins, who was general manager of the Patagonia outerwear company for 20 years until 1993. “And in this sense, Cape Froward is part of an ecological puzzle that, over time, should ensure the permanent protection of important biodiversity areas in Chilean Patagonia.”

The Guardian’s reporting was supported by The Wilding of Chile