Pumalin Park

Douglas Tompkins, who founded The North Face and Esprit, began buying land in this part of the Chilean coast in 1991 and eventually assembled a very large holding of temperate rainforest, including some of the last unlogged alerce stands. The project was regarded with deep suspicion in Chile for years - a foreigner owning a strip of land reaching from the Argentine border to the sea, in a country sensitive about territory - and it took decades of negotiation. In 2018, after Tompkins's death, his widow Kristine McDivitt Tompkins handed the land to the Chilean state, and it became Pumalin Douglas Tompkins national park.

What you actually see

• Unlogged temperate rainforest - including old alerce stands.
• Land assembled privately from 1991 - by Douglas Tompkins.
• Deep Chilean suspicion at the time - about foreign ownership of a border strip.
• Handed to the state in 2018 - and made a national park.

When to go

December to March; the Carretera Austral is hard going in winter. Several days.

Honest expectations

This is one of the wettest places in Chile - rain most days, in most months. Access involves gravel roads and ferries that must be booked in summer. Facilities are campsites and trails rather than lodges. Volcanic ash from Chaiten still affects parts.

Nearby

Chaiten and its volcano are south; Hornopiren is north up the Carretera.