The Edge of Chilean Patagonia

  • Torres del Paine National Park.

    Torres del Paine National Park.

  • A Chilean cowboy surveying valley of the Rio Baguales.

    A Chilean cowboy surveying valley of the Rio Baguales.

  • Last Hope Channel, looking towards Torres del Paine and the Serrano and Balmaceda glaciers.

    Last Hope Channel, looking towards Torres del Paine and the Serrano and Balmaceda glaciers.

  • A road entering Ancud, town on Isla Grande, Chiloé.

    A road entering Ancud, town on Isla Grande, Chiloé.

  • Cowboy riding west towards Torres del Paine in late afternoon.

    Cowboy riding west towards Torres del Paine in late afternoon.

  • The Rio Vizcacha Basin.

    The Rio Vizcacha Basin.

  • Gaucho Patricio Varcaza in a sheep pen in Estancia Cerro Guido.

    Gaucho Patricio Varcaza in a sheep pen in Estancia Cerro Guido.

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By the end of my first week in Chile I’ve worked my way down to Quellón, a hardscrabble port at the southern tip of Chiloé and the northern terminus for ferries heading across the Gulf of Corcovado into the even more remote Chonos Archipelago. My ride is a bright-orange vessel called the MV Alejandrina, which will take me to places along the Patagonian coast that are accessible only by boat or seaplane. We set off around midnight, chugging quietly past the Isla Cailín, site of a 16th-century Jesuit mission that Spanish colonials once called “the world’s outer limit of Christianity.” Beyond, on the southern side of the gulf, is a region of wild islands and fjords that was never tamed by the conquistadors, or anyone else. The very place we are heading.

Exposed to the hardy swells of the open Pacific, the passage across the gulf is rough, sending more than one passenger dashing for the lavatory. It’s still dark when we enter calm water in the lee of Isla Ascensión, and soon we’re moored off Melinka, the first of nine tiny ports the Alejandrina visits on her southward run.

Melinka is the region’s oldest European settlement, founded in 1869 by a Lithuanian émigré who named it after his wife. It’s still hardly more than a frontier town. Leaving the warmth of my cabin, I scurry ashore for a look-see. None of the waterfront shops are open at this wee hour, but plenty of people have gathered to greet the ferry. I ask one of them, a local merchant, what people do here other than fish. “Drink!” he laughs.

Beyond Melinka, the ferry runs a zigzag course through a group of islands marked beguilingly on my map as Peligroso Manzana, or “Dangerous Apples.” Mist hovers like spiderwebs across the coves, and forest crowds the shore against a backdrop of snow-capped volcanoes on the mainland. Here and there are secluded ports of call, some so tiny you have to wonder why they even have a ferry service.

My third and last day on the ferry begins with a steel-gray dawn. Dense fog chokes the channel between the mainland and heavily wooded Isla Magdalena, a breeding ground for seabirds and Magellanic penguins. Most of the island is protected within the confines of a national reserve, a park that’s nearly im-possible to visit owing to its lack of facilities. There are no lodges, no campgrounds, no hiking trails, no permanently stationed rangers. But there is one ultra-remote settlement—Puerto Gaviota.

To my surprise, the men lingering around the town’s ferry landing have an almost piratical appearance, with enough long hair, tattoos, and body piercings to outfit the crew of the Black Pearl—or perhaps even the Caleuche. A metalworker named Roberto Vadim, whom I meet building a new gymnasium and community center next to Gaviota’s only church, helps explain why the port has such a raffish air. “The first people who came here in the ’80s were political dissidents trying to get away from Pinochet,” he tells me. “Or people running away from something else. Not criminals so much, but people doing things that the government or regular society didn’t approve of.”

They were self-imposed exiles, carving their own secret gulag out of the Patagonian wilderness. They were also squatters on na-tional park land. Whenever park rangers—or Pinochet’s secret police—came to expel them, they fled into the woods and hid until the coast was quite literally clear. “The only person who would help them,” Vadim continues, “was an Italian priest named Antonio Ronchi, who gave them communion, who married them and buried them when nobody else would. He also came with food, clothes, and building supplies.”

Father Ronchi was also instrumental in convincing national park authorities to let the residents remain on Isla Magdalena after Pinochet was ousted. In fact, it wasn’t until 2000—just a few years after the priest passed away—that Gaviota received full legal status. Yet in death, Father Ronchi has evolved into something of a supernatural figure, a legend on par with the witches and ogres of Chiloe. Gaviotans tell tales about how he would suddenly appear with badly needed food and supplies in a tiny boat in the middle of a ferocious storm. There was no way to explain his ability to survive both blizzards and the secret police—other than by magic.

Turning up the long and gorgeous Aisén Fjord, the Alejandrina reaches mainland Pata-gonia and the southern limit of its run. From Puerto Chacabuco it takes an hour by bus to reach Coihaique, a city that lies in a green valley between snowcapped summits. This is one of the few places in southern Chile where you can cross the Andes into Argentina on a good road … or hop on a flight to the end of the earth.

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