Parque Pumalin

The park is the largest private nature reserve and belonged to Douglas Tompkins, the founder of The North Face. Benefiting from the laws in Chile that allow foreigners to acquire land, he was able to acquire 550,000 hectares of Chilean rainforest and became a pioneer in sustainable environmental protection. And you can tell!

In the national park there are very very beautiful holiday homes, campsites and everything is perfectly signposted and well maintained. However, the Chileans are anything but grateful. For them, it is unimaginable that someone spends so much money out of love for nature, which is why there are all sorts of theories about why he buys so much land. He wants to divide Chile, he is working with Argentina, etc... Douglas Tompkins died two years ago and bequeathed his national parks to the Chilean government.

You can strongly feel his love for nature in the national park. There are many educational trails that explain the local flora and fauna. There are hikes from 1-10 hours. A highlight were the 500 year old Chilean larch trees, which were very difficult to hug with their 3 meter trunk diameter.

In the southern part of the park there is also a spa where we made ourselves comfortable in bad weather. Through the rainforest you go to a glacier (yes, there is still an ice field here), waterfalls and lakes.