Day 11: October 12

After yesterday’s climb to the volcano, today we decided to simply take a walk in Pumalín National Park.

A very unusual and interesting story of the park’s creation.

There once lived an American named Douglas Tompkins.
Douglas was the founder of the outdoor clothing brand The North Face and loved Patagonia very much.
He often came to Chile, went rock climbing here, and kayaked.
In the early 1990s, Douglas came up with the idea of preserving the forests of Patagonia from destruction.
He bought the first plot of land, then another, and another.
The local people were distrustful of Douglas. Imagine, an American buying up the land of your country...

In 2005, the area owned by Douglas, covering 280,000 hectares (that’s almost the size of Luxembourg!), was declared a nature reserve.

In 2017, the park territory was “given back” to Chile, and in 2018, three years after Douglas’s death, the park was declared national.