‘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 set to create the country’s 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of pristine wilderness and completing a wildlife corridor stretching 1,700 miles (2,800 km) to the southern tip of the Americas.

Cape Froward National Park is a wild expanse of wind-torn coastline and forested valleys that is home to unparalleled biodiversity and has hosted millennia of human history.

“I’ve been to many great places and I can tell you that the Cape Froward Project is the wildest place I’ve ever been,” said Kristine Tompkins, the famous American environmentalist who created the project. “This is one of the few remaining areas of truly wild forest and peaks in the country, and the region’s rich Indigenous history makes the case for preserving these lands forever. »

It is the 17th national park created or expanded in Chile and Argentina by Tompkins Conservation and its successor organization, Rewilding Chile. The groups spent the better part of a decade piecing together a patchwork 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.

In February, a population of 10 huemul, an endangered species of deer, was discovered in the park, and a network of cameras regularly capture wild pumas and the huillín, an endangered river otter. The area also includes 10,000 hectares of sphagnum bogs, a sponge-like moss that stores carbon deep down.

Benjamín Cáceres, Magallanes region conservation coordinator for Rewilding Chile, is originally from Patagonia and first visited Cape Froward at age 12 with his conservationist father, Patricio Cáceres.

“My father was always a dreamer,” he says. “When he discovered an abandoned lighthouse all those years ago, he brought us here as a family to dream with him – and that’s where this story began for me. »

The San Isidro Lighthouse is one of seven lighthouses designed and built by Scottish architect George Slight along the dangerous Strait of Magellan. It was abandoned in the 1970s and itinerant fishermen came to collect wood until the roof collapsed.

Today, Patricio and Benjamín’s vision for the restored lighthouse is becoming a reality. It has been transformed into a museum of the natural and human history of the region and will become, with a café on the beach below, the entry point to the new national park.

Along the shoreline are delicate archaeological sites that document the history of the Kawésqar, a nomadic indigenous people who navigated the fjords, rocky beaches and forests in canoes carved from trees.

“This mosaic of ecosystems is extremely important,” Cáceres said. “The sub-Antarctic peatlands and forests are incredibly fragile, and the cultural heritage of the Kawésqar territory, the era of explorers and then whalers; all this history and biodiversity will be preserved in one form or another in the future national park.”

Among the shells buried in the silty mud of Kawésqar campsites are bones of birds and dolphins from parties. There are even circles of stones placed as fish traps on the beaches, and trees stripped of their bark to line the hulls of Kawésqar canoes.

“The region was largely inhabited by nomadic canoeists who lived by fishing and gathering food,” said Leticia Caro, an activist from Kawésqar belonging to the Nómades del Mar community. “For our community it is very important to protect this area, where we can also see the different ways of inhabiting the land and seas, and the interaction with other peoples like the Yagán, the Selknam and the Tehuelche.

Long after the installation of indigenous communities in the region, the waters of the Strait of Magellan, which the Kawésqar call the tawokser chamshas become the link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Charles Darwin came down from the Beagle to climb nearby Mount Tarn on its journey along the Chilean coast and the strait was one of the most important shipping routes in the world until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.

The murky depths have claimed many lives and spawned legends. Treasures lie in the depths and sealed bottles of rum have washed ashore over the centuries.

Timber from the forests was transported to the Falkland Islands and Buenos Aires for construction, and in 1905 the Magallanes Whaling Society was established. Eleven years later, with the whale population decimated, an auction was held to sell the company’s land and equipment.

In Bahía el Águila, where the carcasses were processed, all that remains are the footprints of the factory and a few rotten stumps of wood. Adolf Andresen, the company’s Norwegian founder, died poor and forgotten in the bars of Punta Arenas in 1940.

But there are still a number of steps before the national park officially comes into being.

An indigenous consultation process, a legal requirement for large-scale projects in Chile, took place in September but failed. Chile’s Environment Ministry said it would make “every effort” to advance plans for the park by March.

But if no progress is made after two years, the land reverts to the ownership of Tompkins’ organizations.

“Each of the park projects we have developed has specific reasons to be considered essential for conservation,” said Tompkins, who was general manager of Patagonia outdoor textile for 20 years until 1993. “And in this sense, Cape Froward is a piece of an ecological puzzle that, over time, should ensure the permanent protection of key sites of Chilean Patagonia’s biodiversity.”

The Guardian’s reporting was supported by Rewilding Chile