In its boundless steppe and forests between the ocean and the Andes, from its permanent ice down to its fruit orchards, Patagonia has always welcomed everyone, in the past and nowadays: explorers and religious refugees, anarchists and farmers, tourists and loners.
At the turn of the year it is summer in the land at the end of the world. The Argentine president, Mauricio Macri, just arrived in Patagonia to rest after a very difficult year. The former president, Cristina Kirchner, who in late December was indicted on serious corruption charges, seldom leaves her Patagonian hotel empire. A thirty year old from Chile, kidnapped at the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris, chose Patagonia to “overcome his trauma”.
Patagonia’s healing power lies in the blending of its void with the grandeur of its horizons. Even in the summer time, when tourists flock to the most spectacular corners of its 12 national parks, there is always another corner or another immensity which everyone can consider as his or her own Patagonia, for better or for worse. This was a curse for the original communities. Many are now extinct, and the survivors, the Mapuche along the Cordillera and a few Tehuelche in the south and along the Atlantic coast, live mostly in poverty.
The southern tip of the Tehuelche area, a region colonized by the Welsh, marks Kilometre Zero of the popular Route 40 that runs through Patagonia for more than 2200 miles. The second largest penguin colony in South America is in Cabo Vírgenes, the cape rounded in 1579 by the buccaneer Francis Drake.
To the south you cross to Tierra del Fuego and its capital Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, right by the Beagle Channel and on the opposite shore to Cape Horn. Its first inhabitants were 300 Anglican missionaries, who went there to evangelize the Yamama in 1884. A few weeks ago it got its first traffic light for pedestrians, despite having been for decades now the nearest port to Antarctica and the tourist base city for the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, where Olympic skiers train in the winter and tourists canoe in the lakes in summer.
Moving away from the Atlantic, Route 40 goes west to the border with Chile, and winds by the Torres del Paine, just across the border. “This place is among the most superb wilderness. Forests, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, are the pedestal of these fantastic castle and towers surrounded by gigantic walls of ice”, wrote Father Alberto de Agostini, one of the last explorers around 1920-1940. He was looking for a high summit to get a panoramic view.
Continuing north for 125 miles you hit the Glaciers National Park, one of Patagonia’s several World Heritage sites. Among its 47 glaciers that continue to grow, the Perito Moreno has a spectacular front wall 5 miles long across the lake from which ice blocks 65-75 yards high fall off into the water at intervals. It is good to be a tourist here, because the ice of Patagonia, so they say, does not return the men who get lost in it.
The most complex and impressive mountain group of the whole Cordillera is another 125 miles north. The amazingly steep sides of Cerro Torre and of the Fitz Roy seem to defy nature itself. In the last decades the two mountains have attracted the bravest climbers like a magnet. Werner Herzog’s film Scream of Stone is set in Cerro Torre. It tells the story of the tragic climb to the “mushroom” ice top by two climbers, following a story by Reinhold Messner. The Fitz Roy is named after the English vice-admiral in charge of tracing the route through the Canal Beagle, who was also the captain of the ship on which Charles Darwin travelled around the world, including his visit to Patagonia in 1832.
The first inhabitants, 20,000-10,000 years ago, left a trace of their presence in Patagonia another 370 miles further north in a cave which is another UNESCO World Heritage Site: the Cueva de las Manos, a cave painting featuring many hands in ochre and reddish tones.
Despite the enormous distances, the Cueva de las Manos is an example of how the wild space devoid of fences, the true spirit of Patagonia, is ever more feeling a huge pressure from the “northern” economy. In the area that is planned to be the entrance of the Parque Nacional Patagonia, the company Patagonia Gold was granted a permit to build an open-pit mine that would cause irreversible damage to the archaeological sites in the area and to its unique landscape.
Patagonia was also generous in welcoming bandits, including the famous Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The wooden house on the land they bought is still there, another 370 miles to the north on Route 40, a gravel/dirt road then and nowadays blasted by gusts of wind that can reach 80 miles per hour.
Meulén, the wind, is one of the four elements of the Mapuche vision of the cosmos, according to which “The Earth”, which belonged to no one, that is, to them, melted together with the sky at night and in silence. This is still so for visitors and residents, but the land is no longer theirs. Mistreated and exploited for centuries, today their communities and a few Tehuelche families live by staying away from the authorities, with whom they often clash. They run campgrounds and are labourers in the estancias, the ranches whose owners arrive on private aircraft. You can see them riding or walking along the same routes travelled by the tourist’s four-wheel-drive off-road vehicles: they live, with the horse, the path and the sky in a space-time dimension that foreigners can only partially approach.
To avoid tourists one could visit Patagonia in the spring when the Andean meadows blossom, but the wind can be just as strong as in the summer.
One visitor not fearful of the wind was Antoine de Saint Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, who arrived in Patagonia in 1929 to found and pilot the planes of Aeroposta Argentina. Night Flight is the story of his flights to Tierra del Fuego. One day, he writes, he was able to see the Pacific from Torino Peak. “What a beautiful country, and how amazing the Andes are! I found myself at an altitude of 21,300 feet while a snowstorm was brewing. The summits spat snow like volcanoes, and it seemed that the whole mountain was about to fizz….”
When a friend of him went missing, Saint Exupéry looked for him “sliding through the walls of the giant pillars of the Andes. It seemed to me that I was not looking for you anymore, but holding a wake for your body in silence in a snow cathedral…” Quite unbelievably they found him in good shape after five days.
The glaciers, mountains and steppe of Patagonia have triggered many similar stories. It is almost as if Patagonia had no history, but many stories. One such is that of the anarchist Errico Malatesta, an exile, who in 1887 participated in the gold rush in Patagonia, and helped found the first Argentine trade union.
One gets closer to more recent history after covering another 185 kilometers to the north, in the spectacular region of the Seven Lakes, where in the Alpine-style homes in Bariloche and its surroundings several fugitive Nazi hid for decades. Peron’s second wife Isabelita also stayed here. imprisoned for seven months after the 1976 military coup.
There is late and recent history on the Atlantic coast as well, nearly 1000 miles to the east through the delicate and infinite plateau populated by rheas and deer, which is as large as France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Switzerland all together. The hinterland of the imposing cliffs where colonies of elephant seals now resist the pollution in the ocean, is where in the 1920s the strikes of land labourers were repressed with massacres and executions, events now known as Tragic Patagonia. Just south from there is the town of Trelew, whose prison was one of the hardest during the military dictatorships.
Patagonia is fragile. Until a few decades ago it protected itself by making life hard for anyone who made it to its shores and steppes. This is no longer a valid weapon. Tourism, one of its biggest resources, is not the main concern. Pollution from oil wells and mining, and urban waste in the crystalline rivers, and the sell-off of hundreds of thousands of hectares of land to foreigners at ridiculous prices with no controls are far more worrying developments. 5% of Patagonia is now in foreign hands, and much of that land includes water and natural and cultural resources. The Benetton family owns 3500 square miles, but the work of its foundation is valued. The British billionaire Joe Lewis, on the other hand, a former owner of the Hard Rock Café, has been indicted in many lawsuits after he bought all the land that surrounds one of the most beautiful lakes in the area, Lago Escondido, and built a private airport that is bigger than the regional one. People protesting “Patagonia vendida” (Sold-off Patagonia) are also criticising a recent pro-investments bill by president Macri which could further simplify the indiscriminate purchase of land in Patagonia.
Patagonia’s “nada” is as coveted and vulnerable as ever, but it is still offering an opportunity to everyone to find his or her own personal Patagonia.
It may have been this space, as many agree, that inspired Saint Exupéry’s character of The Little Prince, for in Patagonia, even today, you can still fall asleep feeling the loneliness and surrounded by dust, sheep and foxes, hundreds of miles away from any inhabited area.
@GuiomarParada
In its boundless steppe and forests between the ocean and the Andes, from its permanent ice down to its fruit orchards, Patagonia has always welcomed everyone, in the past and nowadays: explorers and religious refugees, anarchists and farmers, tourists and loners.
