From the Lodge at Valle Chacabuco

Last August, I wrote about the new Lodge at Valle Chacabuco, part of the audacious new conservation project in Chile’s Aisén region, just northeast of the town of Cochrane. Estancia Valle Chacabuco is in the process of being turned into Parque Nacional Patagonia, which would incorporate the existing protected areas of Reserva Nacional Laguna Jeinimeni and Reserva Nacional Tamango, with its key huemul (Andean deer) habitat. This would create a nearly unbroken swath of protected areas totaling roughly 380,000 hectares, stretching almost from the town of Chile Chico, on Lago General Carrera, south to Lago Cochrane.

Estancia Valle Chacabuco is a former sheep ranch (now home to abundant herds of guanacos), acquired by conservationist Kris McDivitt Tompkins (pictured below, center, at the lodge) and the foundation Conservación Patagónica, who outbid Chilean interests concerned - or obsessed - with the Patagonian property acquisitions of McDivitt’s husband Doug Tompkins, creator of Parque Pumalín. The plan is to donate the land as a national park and they have already opened the shining new lodge, with a visitor center, campgrounds and a restaurant all under construction (all of these should be ready for the next austral summer). All facilities will, in the long run, be leased to concessionaires under the new national park regime.

I had visited the property a couple times before, once inauspiciuosly when a reckless employee of the former estancia hit my own car nearly head-on as I drove toward the Argentine border. The second time was a couple years ago, before any construction was underway. This was the first time, though, that I had a chance to see the lodge in person and spend a night there.

In its exterior style, the custom-built lodge is appropriate to a mountainous park on the cusp between the Patagonian steppe and the forested western Andes. Its interior resembles its counterpart at Estancia Rincón del Socorro, where the Tompkinses have employed Argentine architects and designers to transform an existing building at the Esteros del Iberá. Valle Chacabuco’s six rooms employ an understated rustic elegance, each with its own theme - mine (pictured above) displayed photographs from Parque Nacional Monte León, a wildlife-rich coastal reserve that the Tompkinses donated to Argentina’s national park system through the Fundación Vida Silvestre.

Having seen the changes in Valle Chacabuco, I’m impressed with the thought and effort put into the project, but I disagree with one aspect of it. In the long run, Conservación Patagónica plans to tear down all the existing buildings, including the woolshed (pictured above) and the houses (pictured below) that lodged the former estancia’s employees. While these buildings may be nondescript, and there may be numerous similar buildings scattered on both sides of the Andes, visitors to the park are not likely to see buildings on other estancias. Preserving the woolshed and at least one of the houses, furnished as it would have been when the ranch was still a wool producer, makes sense to me. Presumably, the visitor center will present this material, but that's not the same as seeing it on the ground.

In the course of my recent stay, I interviewed Kris McDivitt for about an hour. Unfortunately, because I’ve had my hands full with updating Moon Handbooks Patagonia, I’ve lacked the time to transcribe and edit the interview, which will likely have to wait until I return to California in April, or perhaps even a bit later.

Socorro Means "Help" - for Argentina's Iberá Marshes

After posting recently about Chile’s proposed Parque Nacional Patagonia and the new lodge there, I realized that, on this blog at least, I had never written about environmental philanthropist Douglas Tompkins’s projects in Argentina but, in 2004, Tompkins and his wife, Kris McDivitt, donated parts of the former Estancia Monte León, in Santa Cruz Province, to Argentina’s national park service through the Patagonia Land Trust. That’s noteworthy in its own right, and I’ll write about it sometime soon, but this post will be dedicated to the Esteros del Iberá, the northeastern wetlands where he has purchased several estancias open to the public and begun to reintroduce the giant anteater. He now spends the southern winter at Estancia Rincón del Socorro, a prime property on the south side of the marshes that’s become a destination for environmentally oriented tourists.


Rincón del Socorro and the surrounding marshes have just about everything, including innumerable birds, caimans (pictured below), capybaras, howler monkeys, marsh deer and rarely seen maned wolves (which are few and nocturnal). In late 2006, though, Tompkins’s efforts earned unwanted publicity when piquetero demagogue Luis D’Elía - then a federal government official - falsely claimed that Tompkins had blocked a public road through Estancia El Tránsito, in another part of the marshes. In a blatant publicity stunt, D’Elía staged an invasion of Tompkins’s property with ostensible campesinos in support.


D’Elía and a handful of congressional xenophobes called for expropriation, but he badly misjudged his own position. Tompkins’s donation of Monte León had benefited then President Néstor Kirchner’s home province of Santa Cruz and, combined with the fact that other Corrientes landowners united behind Tompkins, D’Elía soon found himself jobless.

That’s not been Tompkins’s only challenge, though. The latest villain is Forestal Andina, a timber company that’s built unauthorized earthworks to drain parts of the marshes for cattle grazing. Such a project would disrupt water flow elsewhere, with unpredictable but almost certainly negative consequences.

Meanwhile, the capybaras - Rottweiler-sized rodents (pictured above) - and rheas still stroll the lawns at Tompkins’s Hostería Rincón del Socorro. Managed by Anglo-Argentine Leslie Cook and his wife, Valeria Verdaguer, it has six impeccably decorated guest rooms with high ceilings and fans, plus three separate bungalows, along with a restaurant open to nonguests by reservation only. Much of the food, including spectacular tomatoes, comes from their own organic gardens. Additional amenities include a quincho for barbecues, a game room with a DVD player (though the guest rooms are TV-free), a library, and even satellite WiFi.

Besides accommodations, Rincón del Socorro organizes boat excursions into the marshes from Colonia Pellegrini, 35 kilometers east, plus horseback rides and catch-and-release fly-fishing (at certain seasons). Guests also have access to mountain bikes.


In addition to Rincón del Socorro, there are also accommodations at Estancia San Alonso, reached only by private plane. Because of Socorro’s isolation, some guests arrive by plane; there is a one-kilometer airstrip 800 meters from the hostería. For those who can’t afford to stay at either, there is a greater diversity of accommodations, along with moderately priced tours, at Colonia Pellegrini.

Hi, Neighbor!

Along with Buenos Aires and Patagonia's Moreno Glacier, Iguazú Falls is one of Argentina's top three attractions, and one of the places people most ask me about. To be sure, it's a spectacular sight, far wider and higher than Niagara, with volumes more water, but I've grown to dislike its Disneyfied commodification--the approach to the falls feels like "Iguazú Theme Park." Away from the falls, in the rest of the surrounding national park, there's plenty of wild subtropical forest.

Still, anyone seeking a really unique experience, without the crowds, should travel to the downstream Iberá marshes of nearby Corrientes province. That's where you'll easily see fauna like the yacaré negro (black caiman) up close and personal.

Even if you don't seek them out, maybe they'll come to you. Today's Clarín carries an account of a five-foot caiman that parked itself on a family's doorstep near the port of Reconquista, across the Río Paraná in Santa Fe province. Responding to the attempted home invasion, local coast guard officials cautiously detained the reptilian perpetrator, then deported it to its natural habitat.