Chilean Govt & Tompkins Conservation Prep National Park Status For 500,000 Remote Acres In Southern Patagonia

Chile’s government is poised to create the country’s 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of pristine wilderness and completing a wildlife corridor stretching 1,700 miles (2,800km) to the southernmost tip of the Americas. The Cape Froward national park is a wild expanse of wind-torn coastline and forested valleys that harbours unrivalled biodiversity and has played host to millennia of human history.

“I have been to many exceptional places, and I can tell you that the Cape Froward project is the wildest place I have walked through,” said Kristine Tompkins, the renowned US conservationist at the heart of the project. “It’s one of the few truly wild forest and peak territories left in the country, and the richness of the Indigenous history in the region makes a case for these territories to be preserved for all time.”

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In February, a population of 10 huemul, an endangered deer species, was found in the park, and a network of cameras regularly captures wild pumas and the endangered huillín, a river otter. The area also encompasses 10,000 hectares of sphagnum bogs, a spongelike moss which stores carbon deep below the ground.

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Dotted along the shoreline are delicate archaeological sites that enshrine the history of the Kawésqar, a nomadic Indigenous people who navigated fjords, rocky beaches and forests in canoes carved from trees. “This mosaic of ecosystems is tremendously important,” said Cáceres. “The bogs and subantarctic forests are incredibly fragile, and the cultural legacy of the Kawésqar territory, the era of explorers, then whalers; all of this history and biodiversity will be preserved in some form in the future national park.” In among shells buried in silty mud at Kawésqar campsites are bird and dolphin bones from feasts. There are even circles of stones set out as fish traps on the beaches, and trees stripped of their bark to line the hulls of Kawésqar canoes.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/25/cape-froward-new-national-park-patagonia-chile