Patagonia National Park: Chile

Andean condors soaring over snow-capped mountains. Waving grasslands where herds of guanacos roam. Mountain lions haunting the shadows. Patagonia National Park offers an extraordinary combination of natural beauty and abundant wildlife.

Centered on southern Chile’s Chacabuco Valley, it showcases the fascinating natural and cultural history of this amazing windswept region at the end of the world. The park exists today due to a committed team of conservationists who forged an innovative public–private partnership catalyzed by private philanthropy.

In Patagonia National Park: Chile, photographer Linde Waidhofer captures the region’s singular beauty. For more than a decade Waidhofer witnessed this national park’s founders—Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, the late Douglas Tompkins, and the Tompkins Conservation team—as they shepherded the land’s transition from former sheep ranch to world-class national park.

With contributions from former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, Yvon Chouinard, and others, Patagonia National Park: Chile invites readers to experience a place that is protected foremost as the home to its wild residents, and that offers human visitors a chance to reconnect with the land’s natural rhythms. Beyond this, the park’s creation is a globally notable example of “rewilding,” of helping nature heal, and ultimately of holding onto wild, radical hope for a future when all of life’s diversity, including people, has freedom to flourish and continue to evolve.