The epic story of Chile's Carretera Austral

A good way to understand a bit more about the physical and cultural side of Patagonia is to think about the two great highways which thread their way down through the region, either side of the Andes.

On the Argentine side, that is Ruta 40. More on that here. On the Chilean side, that is the Carretera Austral - the Southern Highway.

Stretching 1,270 dramatic kilometres, from the Lake District to the icefields in the south, the Carretera Austral embodies everything we love about this remote and breathtaking part of the world.

This extraordinary route weaves through a diverse tapestry of landscapes and wildlife habitats, all interconnected by national parks. Here, vast temperate rainforests, rewilded grasslands, glacial lagoons, basalt mountains, and remote icefields are permanently protected under the pioneering Route of Parks tourism conservation project. To drive down even half of it is to experience this incredible variety of ecosystems, sometimes several within a single day.

The Carretera Austral, effectively a massive cul-de-sac, was initiated in the 1970s by General Pinochet to connect remote communities and curb Argentine ambitions for Pacific coast access.

Northern Patagonia is not the most obvious place to eke out a living. The untamed climate is one thing, but the almost total lack of cultivable land means that no significant settled population could ever be sustained. Historically, the only people along this coastline were the Kawésqar hunter-gathering communities, who migrated up and down the archipelago, setting up fishing encampments, drying hides, and then moving on.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that sheep farms were established in the drier grasslands around Coyhaique, although access was always from across the Argentine border – the ranches effectively existed as remote outposts. At around the same time, many were on the move in the aftermath of the revolutions in the German states. Chile actively courted German immigration and encouraged them to set up farms in the south of the country, primarily between Valdivia and Puerto Montt.

With 30,000 immigrants, the farmland began to run out, forcing the more adventurous and robust settlers further south into the virgin lands of Patagonia. It is for this reason that places like Puyuhuapi, Puerto Cisnes, and Chile Chico exist today. By the late 20th century, there was an enormous stretch of the Chilean mainland, incredibly sparsely populated and effectively completely isolated from the rest of the country.

Now, introduce some geopolitics. Argentina has always coveted Pacific access. Imagine if goods could be landed in Buenos Aires and shipped across the country into the Pacific. No more Cape Horn, nor Panama Canal. Quite apart from the existence of Chile being a block to these ambitions, the Andes form a formidable, often impassable barrier. But not so in the area of Coyhaique. Here, the Patagonian steppe cuts a swathe right across to the Pacific port of Aisén. Coyhaique was Chile’s Achilles heel.

Although the town was founded in 1929 by ranchers, it only grew significantly when an army base was established there in the late 1940s. As tensions with Argentina peaked in the late 1970s, the size of the garrison reached its largest. A town of 20,000 people was now being sustained in complete terrestrial isolation.

Thus, the ambitious plan for Chile’s Southern Highway was formulated.

Projects of this scale, wildly ambitious with high human cost, are often driven by dictators like Pinochet. Any democratically elected leader would baulk at the human and monetary costs of driving a 1,270km road into Patagonia, much of it through challenging, uneven terrain.

But that’s what happened. Officially opened in 1990, the project is still ongoing. The road to Tortel only opened in 2000. The paving of the road creeps gradually south from Puerto Montt and outwards from Coyhaique. As you travel the Carretera nowadays, you will regularly come across people working on the road, scraping and stabilising the surface. Each year, it gets a little bit smoother.

The motivation for the development now is less geopolitical and more socio-economic. This region is the least economically developed part of Chile, where people generally live modestly in harsh surroundings. Given the lack of cultivable land and the spectacular landscapes, the great hope for the Carretera Austral is tourism. 

The Aysén region, through which it winds boasts a population density only half that of Mongolia. Half. Yet, the few people you encounter will offer some of the warmest hospitality imaginable. They share a genuine love for, and pride in, the beautiful region they call home. Everywhere you go, you witness simple rural living: brightly painted houses set in stunning surroundings, people carrying large loads of wood up the walkways of Tortel, gauchos riding along the road with their dogs trotting behind.

Some 20 years after Pura Aventura first travelled the length of the Carretera, the Route of Parks project has placed the precious landscapes under permanent protection, bringing economic opportunity to rural communities through small-scale ecotourism.

This is a groundbreaking tourism conservation project linking 17 national parks across 2,800km of Patagonia, from the Lake District to legendary Cape Horn, along the remote beauty of the Carretera Austral, the twisting glaciers of the icefields and the mountains of Torres del Paine.

The scale is mind-boggling, overwhelming; the length of the route is the equivalent of driving from London to Moscow. The area covered is bigger than Iceland, Portugal and Bulgaria and is more than double the size of Costa Rica. 

But at its heart, the route is the culmination of a very personal and improbable ambition, realized over time thanks to extraordinary perseverance, dedication and a sheer love of Patagonia on the part of Douglas and Kristine Tompkins and like-minded partners.

The project protects precious land from the destructive forces of large-scale cattle rearing, mining and oil extraction, for the benefit of all; the wildlife, the locals and visitors alike. Rewilding efforts have returned guanacos, pumas, huemul deer and foxes to their natural habitats. Eco-tourism offers ranchers a more sustainable and lucrative source of income, and a sensitive and considered way for us all to experience these wonderful environments and allow future generations to follow in our footsteps.

This is Patagonia—beautiful, epic, and unvarnished. For those who seek to ignite their inner explorer, there are few places in the world more suited to the task.