What lifts a place from the picturesque to the beautiful? And what is it about that place that makes a traveller want to grab a hashtag and start posting their pictures on Instagram? In recent years, travellers to Chile both on the road and online have been hearing a lot about the Marble Caves in Aysen. On a recent trekking trip to the region I went to experience them for myself to see if they were more than how they measured up against the rest of Aysen’s spectacular scenery.
What and where are the Marble Caves?
Describing the Marble Caves is simplicity itself – everything is in the name. The caves are formed from exposed cliffs of marble, which is really just a type of limestone with great swirls of colour rippling through it like mineral ice cream. They sit on the waters of Lake General Carrera and are only accessible by boat: the cliffs they’re part of plunge straight into the lake. Over millennia, the gentle action of the waves has carved caves and grottoes out of the marble, creating improbable shapes out of solid stone, all run through with colours that were first set down millions of years ago when the cliffs were part of an ancient seabed way back in the Jurassic era.
The Marble Caves themselves aren’t quite that ancient. In fact, they’re thought to only be about 6200 years old. That makes them fresh and new not just in geological terms, but also for Aysen’s human history. The Tehuelche people who were the region’s first inhabitants had already been here for several thousand years before the changing water levels of the lake began patiently sculpting the marble.
Lake General Carrera lies in northern Chilean Patagonia. Its waters straddle the border with Argentina, where it’s known as Lake Buenos Aires (in Chile we celebrate General José Miguel Carrera as one of our most important leaders in the war of independence from Spanish rule in the early 19th century). I arrived at the lake by travelling down the famed Carretera Austral highway that runs down Chile’s southern spine.
I was staying at Villa Cerro Castillo on the edge of Cerro Castillo National Park for some trekking. This was a little further away than most people do it, who stay in the gateway town of Puerto Tranquilo, often at the pretty lakefront cabins of El Mirador de Guadal, a Swoop favourite.
The lake is truly at the heart of this part of Aysen. Although it’s the Marble Caves that first draw many people’s attention here, Cerro Castillo offers world class trekking that rivals even Torres del Paine (but without the people), while a short distance away to the south is Patagonia National Park, one of Chile’s great recent conservation success stories. Slightly to the east, there’s San Rafael glacier, which emerges improbably from a rainforest straight into a dramatic fjord. It’s the sort of wild landscape that Aysen specialises in, and a reminder that even if your first plan is the Marble Caves, they’re only one part of a much bigger package that this region has to offer.
Exploring by kayak
There are a couple of options for seeing the Marble Caves. The first is to take one of the small boats that carry about half a dozen passengers each from the dock at Puerto Tranquilo. Wanting to explore under my own power, I joined a group of three other travellers and took to the water by kayak instead.
After checking all our kit (everything was provided) and getting a safety briefing from our guide, we pushed off from Puerto Tranquilo beach. I was in a single kayak, but there was also the option of twin and sit on top kayaks as well.
We spent a while paddling around the bay so that the guide could make sure she was happy with our technique, before heading out to the caves. We stuck fairly close to the shore where it was more sheltered. It’s worth mentioning here that Puerto Tranquilo has its own little microclimate that makes it more reliably sunny and warm than many other parts of Patagonia. But the water in the lake is incredibly cold! It’s very easy to look at the photos and be tricked into thinking that you’re somewhere tropical. But as soon as you trailed a hand in the water you got a sharp reminder that Lake General Carrera is fed by glacial meltwater. This wasn’t somewhere for an idle swim – not without a good wetsuit at least.
But glacier water also has its own cold magic. It has an unusually high mineral content, full of the same microscopic calcium compounds that help make up the marble. This gives it an unusually bright and glassy appearance under sunlight. In the bright sun, the whole lake was an incredible shining turquoise.
Into the Marble Caves
We were blessed with a particularly calm day, which meant a gentle paddle of around 30 minutes to get to the caves, though on a windy day we would have had to put our backs into it a little more. Approaching them by kayak definitely felt worth it, as we had the sense of getting to discover them ourselves, right on the waterline. If you want to do this, I’d suggest taking a kayak tour first thing in the morning, before the motorboat tours start running. The caves don’t ever get crowded, but there’s an extra buzz in having them to yourselves.
We made our way along the marble cliffs until we came to the caves themselves. There are three main formations – one free standing and two dug into the actual cliffs. The free standing one is like a giant mushroom sculpted from marble, topped with vegetation that hangs over its sides. This is the Chapel (Capilla de Mármol), that you see reproduced in the tourist literature to such an extent that it’s become a visual shorthand for all the caves.
As we approached, we could see how the waters had eroded away the bottom of the rock, so that it looked like the whole thing was resting on skinny tapering legs. In one place a complete passageway had been created so that we could see through to the far shore of the lake, though it was a little too narrow to navigate by kayak.
*
As we contemplated whether or not we could try, our guide reminded us that the caves are protected, and it’s forbidden to climb or touch them. When tourists first started to visit them, people used to get out of their boats and scramble around the caves and even break pieces off them for souvenirs. Thankfully those days are over, and we were regularly reminded not to get too close, to avoid damage by accidentally striking them with our paddles.
In fact, the best thing about the caves was just quietly floating through and around them. From the Chapel, we explored the Cathedral (Catedral de Mármol) and the Cave (Caverna de Mármol). Here, we could get under the cliff itself to where the erosion was even more dramatic. Great walls of marble had been reduced to columns we could drift past, and then to strangely swirling buttresses that really did make the caves feel like a natural church.
This was where I discovered that what makes the Marble Caves special is a combination of three things. Rock and water are the first two, but it was the third that tied everything together. The same light that made the lake so impossibly turquoise now bounced around inside the caves, rippling off the water and the marble to paint a constantly changing picture. It was a complete delight.
After quietly bobbing up and down with the gentle lap of the water, we lifted our paddles and turned back to Puerto Tranquilo. It seemed like a good name: Aysen is one of Chile’s great untamed destinations and full of opportunities to make your own adventure, but a couple of hours at the caves had been a lovely way to recharge between hikes. Muy tranquilo. Very calm.
*
