A wildlife corridor stretching to the tip of the Americas

Protection of remote Patagonian coastline and forest with unrivalled biodiversity will connect 2,800km of national parkland

- John Bartlett

Chile's government is poised to create the country's 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares of pristine wilderness and completing a wildlife corridor stretching 2,800km to the southernmost tip of the Americas.

"I have been to many exceptional places, and I can tell you that 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, and the richness of the Indigenous history in the region makes a case for these territories to be preserved for all time."

It is the 17th national park created or expanded in Chile and Argentina by Tompkins Conservation and its successor organisation, Rewilding Chile. The groups 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, they signed an agreement with the Chilean government to donate the land to become Cape Froward national park.

Last February, a population of 10 huemul, an endangered deer, was found in the park. A network of cameras regularly captures wild pumas and the endangered huillín, a river otter.

Benjamín Cáceres, the conservation coordinator in the Magallanes region for Rewilding Chile, is a native of Patagonia who first visited Cape Froward at the age of 12 with his conservationist father, Patricio Cáceres.