Chile's missing link

Final piece added to 1,750-mile wildlife park

- John Bartlett

Chile's government is poised to create the country's 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares (494,00 acres) of pristine wilderness and completing a 1,750-mile wildlife corridor from central Chile to the southernmost tip of South America.

The new Cape Froward national park is a wild expanse of wind-torn coastline and forested valleys that harbours unrivalled biodiversity, and has played host to millennia of human history.

"I have been to many exceptional places, and I can tell you the Cape Froward project is the wildest place I have walked through," said Kristine Tompkins, the renowned US conservationist at the heart of the project. "It's one of the few truly wild forest and peak territories left in the country. The richness of the Indigenous history in the region makes a case for these territories to be preserved."

This will become the 17th national park created or expanded in Chile and Argentina by Tompkins Conservation and Rewilding Chile, its successor organisation, which have spent the best part of a decade knitting together a patchwork of land purchases and state-held properties to create the park.

In 2023, the group signed an agreement with the Chilean government to donate the land to become Cape Froward national park. In February this year, a new population of 10 huemul, an endangered deer species, was found in the park, and a network of camera traps regularly captures wild pumas and the endangered huillín, a type of river otter. The area even encompasses 10,000 hectares of sphagnum bogs, a spongelike moss that stores carbon deep beneath the earth.