🇨🇱 Chile · Patagonia and the far south
Pumalín Park, officially Parque Nacional Pumalín Douglas Tompkins, is one of the great sanctuaries of temperate rainforest in northern Chilean Patagonia. It spreads across hundreds of thousands of hectares in the Los Lagos Region, between the Pacific and the cordillera, protecting Valdivian rainforest, thousand-year-old alerce trees, fjords, volcanoes and rivers in exceptional condition.
The park was born of a pioneering conservation project driven by the American philanthropist Douglas Tompkins and his wife Kristine, who bought and restored enormous stretches of forest and then donated them to the Chilean state. Today it forms part of the Patagonia Park Network and stands as a model of private conservation turned public heritage, crossed by the Carretera Austral.
Pumalín offers trails through alerce forests (one of the longest-lived trees on the planet), waterfalls, lookouts towards the Chaitén volcano — whose 2008 eruption marked the region — well-kept campgrounds and access to the fjords. This guide covers the main trails and sectors, how to get there along the Carretera Austral and what to bear in mind in one of the rainiest and most beautiful parts of Chile.
Pumalín Park has its origins in an ambitious private conservation project begun in the 1990s by the American Douglas Tompkins, founder of outdoor clothing brands, who acquired vast stretches of native forest in northern Patagonia in order to protect them. After years of being run as a private reserve (Parque Pumalín), the land was donated to the Chilean state and, in 2018, folded into the National System of Protected Wild Areas as Parque Nacional Pumalín Douglas Tompkins, part of the historic creation of the Patagonia Park Network.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the Lake District and of the Chiloé archipelago: Puerto Varas and Frutillar with their German imprint facing the Osorno volcano, the wooden churches and stilt houses of Chiloé, a World Heritage Site, and the gateway to Patagonia.
Read the history of Los Lagos Region →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Pumalín Park is, above all, that of a visionary and contentious conservation project. In the 1990s the American businessman Douglas Tompkins — co-founder of outdoor clothing brands such as The North Face and Esprit — decided to devote his fortune to a single cause: saving wild nature. Convinced of the worth of Patagonia's pristine ecosystems, he began buying enormous stretches of temperate rainforest in northern Chilean Patagonia, in the Los Lagos Region.
Tompkins and his wife, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins — former head of the Patagonia brand — went on acquiring hundreds of thousands of hectares with the aim of protecting them from logging, ranching and extractive projects, and of eventually returning them to public ownership as protected areas. That was how Pumalín Park was born, run at first as a private park open to the public, with trails, campgrounds and infrastructure of an extremely high standard designed in harmony with its surroundings.
The project was not without controversy: the idea of a foreigner amassing so much land — running practically from the sea to the cordillera — stirred suspicion and theories in parts of Chilean society and politics. Over time, though, the seriousness of the Tompkinses' conservation commitment came to be recognized, and Pumalín established itself as a pioneering model of private conservation in South America.
In May 2008 an extraordinary natural event shook the area: the Chaitén volcano, inside the park's territory and considered dormant for thousands of years, erupted suddenly. The explosion, with an enormous ash column rising kilometers into the sky, caught scientists and residents by surprise, since no activity was expected from that volcano.
The eruption forced the evacuation of the nearby town of Chaitén, the provincial capital a few kilometers away. The ash, the lahars (mudflows) that followed and the flooding of the Blanco river caused severe damage, inundating and burying part of the town, which had to be partly rebuilt and relocated. It was one of the most significant natural disasters in recent Chilean history.
Inside the park the eruption transformed the landscape: extensive areas of forest were flattened or buried in ash, and the volcano built a new lava dome in its crater. Over the years, nature began its slow regeneration, and today the trail up to the Chaitén crater lookout lets you take in both the mark of the devastation and the forest's rebirth, an impressive testament to the power of the earth and the resilience of life.
The ultimate destiny of the Tompkinses' project was to turn their private conservation work into public heritage for Chile. After Douglas Tompkins died in 2015 in a kayaking accident in Patagonia, his wife Kristine carried the project forward and completed a historic donation: the handover to the Chilean state of vast stretches of conserved land, in what is regarded as one of the largest donations of private land for conservation in history.
In 2018 the Chilean state, adding public land of its own, formally created the Patagonia Park Network, a set of new and enlarged national parks protecting millions of hectares along the south of the country. Within that framework, the former Parque Pumalín joined the National System of State Protected Wild Areas as Parque Nacional Pumalín Douglas Tompkins, in tribute to the man who drove it.
And so what began as the conservationist dream of a foreign philanthropist became a Chilean national park, open to all and protected in perpetuity. Pumalín today stands as a model of how private conservation can become a public legacy, and it is one of the jewels of Patagonia reachable from the Carretera Austral.
The land Pumalín protects today is one of the great strongholds of Valdivian temperate rainforest, an ancient, humid forest type that covers southern Chile and small parts of Argentina and ranks among the most biodiverse and most threatened ecosystems on the planet. It grows species such as coihue, ulmo and tepa, giant nalcas, ferns and, above all, the alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides), a native conifer that can live more than three thousand years and reach enormous size.
For centuries the alerce was one of the most coveted resources in southern Chile: its timber, resistant to damp and of superb quality, was used on a huge scale for houses, shingles and churches — among them the celebrated churches of Chiloé — which led to intensive felling that decimated many forests. In 1976 the alerce was declared a Natural Monument in Chile, banning the cutting of living specimens. Protecting these thousand-year-old forests was one of the central motivations behind the Pumalín conservation project.
The Carretera Austral (Route 7), built from the 1970s onwards to connect isolated Chilean Patagonia, now crosses the park and is the road that lets you travel through it. This combination of pristine forest, ancient alerces, fjords and the mythic southern highway makes Pumalín a privileged gateway to the deep south of Chile, where nature still has the upper hand over the human imprint.