What It Took to Create a National Park in Chile

21.05.2024 - 14:45 / cntraveler.com / Kris Tompkins

“Over the last 200 years, we humans have moved away from our daily and direct interaction with the natural world—even though we know this slowly evolving predicament is perilous for our survival,” writes Kris Tompkins.

Patagonia National Park: Chile is out May 21, 2024, wherever books are sold.

In a new book, Patagonia National Park: Chile, released by Patagonia—the company Tompkins was CEO of for two decades—the avid-conservationist reflects on the importance of protecting wild spaces, and the benefit of doing so for wildlife and humans alike.

It's something she knows quite a bit about, having formed Tompkins Conservation in 1992, through which she (and, for many years, her late husband Doug) have worked “nonstop” to create seven new national parks in Chile, and expand three others, with similar efforts in Argentina. This book traces the 15 years it took to establish one protected landmass—from the very first night Kris and Doug camped on the windswept Patagonian lands in Chile, to the present, when the park has come to serve as “a model… for conservation and restoration projects,” thanks to the hard work and collaboration of local communities, governments, and the “geniuses of the place."

Below is an excerpt from the book, written by Tompkins herself, out now.

Chile's Patagonia National Park is a rugged landscape with deep valleys, snow-capped peaks, and a beauty appreciated by thousands of visitors every year.

So, here we are, standing on the eastern edge of the Río Baker, Chile’s largest river by volume, at the confluence where it joins the Río Chacabuco. Together these rivers form the almost-indescribable turquoise waters that boil up and swirl into small siphoning holes as they bend and flow south to the Pacific Ocean. Sacred waters to the Tehuelche, the Indigenous peoples who crossed deep valleys from what is today Argentina to get to the sea. Thousands of years later, estancieros and gauchos (ranchers and horsemen) drove their livestock to the river to transport the animals from the same deep valleys to ships docked at Tortel where their livestock would be shipped to faraway markets.

In 1994 my husband Doug and I arrived to camp one cold night in what would become this new national park 12 years later. Camping along the Río Chacabuco, we could imagine that such an extraordinary place should be protected forever: It was like nothing we had seen before. Now, after all these years, almost to the day, we celebrate what would become one of the world’s largest grasslands restoration projects, watching species whose numbers had been low and fragile coming back in healthy numbers. I watch as tens, then hundreds, then thousands of visitors come each year to soak up the beauty of the park, to have