Torres del Paine captured my heart on my first visit there nearly ten years ago. I was so won over by its wild beauty that made me want to become a mountain guide. It was where I did my guide training and where I then worked for five seasons, guiding guests from all over the world to every corner of the park. It’s a place that speaks deeply to my soul.
But I also know that sometimes it’s possible to love a place a little too much. In the years since my first trip I’ve seen a lot of changes in the national park, and not all of them for the better. Visitor numbers have soared, especially since the pandemic, and this has put increasing pressure on the park infrastructure.
But this growth in visitor numbers doesn’t have to just be about challenges – it can be about opportunities as well. This season I visited Patagonia Camp on the edge of the national park, to learn more about their sustainability initiatives, and whether their approach can lead the way for future development in this fragile region.
How to build a sustainable luxury camp
Patagonia Camp sits on a secluded peninsula that juts out onto Lake Toro about a 25 minute drive from the entrance to Torres del Paine National Park. It hosts around 40 or so guests in a secluded luxury in a series of yurts that break out of the forest to give unexpected views of the Paine Massif. It’s the sort of place that doesn’t need to shout about its natural grace and style.
The camp is threaded together by a ribbon of wooden walkways that run through the forest and an ever-present nod to the high standards set in building the camp amongst a particularly forbidding landscape. I was told that when it was first built, the biggest rule was that not a single tree could be removed or damaged: the entire design had to be made according to what nature told the architects about where they had space to put the buildings. The walkways are raised and the platforms for the yurts also sit on narrow stilts embedded into the rock below. The hope is the anchors for the stilts should be the only permanent marks that the camp should ever leave on the landscape.
Keeping the waters pristine
Building Patagonia Camp was only the first part of the puzzle – running it sustainably is another challenge completely, especially when the entire property is off-grid.
I got a taste of just how those challenges are being met on a tour of what the camp regards as its best feature. Not the Jacuzzis overlooking the lake, or the stylish plates of locally sourced food being served in the restaurant, but its bespoke water treatment plant.
Lake Toro offers the perfect water source for Patagonia Camp, but the remote nature of the camp makes getting rid of waste water a problem. General Manager Mariana Ramírez was eager to show me the solution – a series of large descending tanks, where all the water from the bathrooms and kitchens is slowly filtered through a series of bacteria-rich peat beds until it emerges at the other end clean enough to drink. The peat, which is sourced from the camp’s site itself , can be reused repeatedly, avoiding the need to repeatedly harvest this finite resource.
Mariana explains that the treatment plant was so new to Chile that the ministry initially thought it looked like a science experiment: ‘When they gave us a permit, we had to prove that it worked by taking water samples three times a day for two years.’ Now, the camp regularly shows off the treatment plant to university researchers, local schools and even the Minister of Health.
When I asked if the treatment plant was one reason why only biodegradable toiletries are allowed in the bathrooms and synthetic items like mouthwash are forbidden, Mariana nods and offers an amused anecdote about just how sensitive the water testing really is. ‘A few years ago, one of our staff dyed her hair and our engineer discovered it in the data before we noticed it in her hair!’
Meeting the challenge of green energy
I hadn’t planned on dying my hair during my trip, but I did want to make full use of all the other facilities on offer. One thing that was noticeable from my guiding days in Torres del Paine was that Patagonia Camp had 24 hour electricity and hot water. It’s a small detail when you’re coming from the outside (and a crucial detail for a luxury camp), but it’s one that plenty of camps and lodges here don’t manage. In Patagonia, the generator remains king, with all its attendant costs – not least in terms of its carbon footprint.
Mariana explains how converting Patagonia Camp to renewable energy has been a challenge since day one. As someone who has been battered in every direction by Patagonia’s wild winds, I’m not surprised to learn that a wind turbine has yet to be invented that can stand up to the region’s gale force gusts. But the camp’s geography has meant that solar power has also proved a limited resource: there just isn’t enough flat space to install enough panels. Currently, only the flat-roofed staff block (largely hidden among the trees from the view of guests) can be used to generate electricity from the sun.
Help is on the way however, thanks to another quirk of the camp’s location. The small pocket-sized waters of Laguna Bonita sits above Patagonia Camp, acting as a feeder of Lake Toro. Mariana showed me the project for a small hydroelectric plant that the camp is planning to install here. When I visited they were still working on the permits, but the camp is hoping to start generating its first watts of electricity soon.
Towards net zero
Being a pioneer for schemes like the water-treatment plant and hydroelectric turbine felt like something that was baked into Patagonia Camp from its outset. It’s an ethos they’re trying to spread beyond just the camp confines.
I’d heard that Mariana was a director of HYST, the association of hotel and camp operators in Torres del Paine who are trying to raise standards of sustainability operations across the region. The camp has also partnered with the Universidad San Sebastián in Santiago to help teach other industry professionals and hand on some of their learnings and best practices.
Another new initiative that the camp is involved with is trying to introduce electric vehicles to Torres del Paine. Patagonia Camp currently runs 14 vehicles, which it uses for everything from taking guests on tours of the park to bringing staff and food to the camp. All currently run on diesel, but the camp is in the process of partnering with Mercedes-Benz to start a pilot project soon to bring electric tourist vehicles to the entire Patagonia region.
It’s been a difficult project to work out, Mariana explains, as it has involved planning the installation of charging points in the national park. ‘We worked out the longest excursion we do, which is to Lake Azul, and we found out it would be needed to have a charging station over there.’
In the meantime, Patagonia Camp is testing its own principles by running a complete carbon audit, with the Chilean governmental body Huella Chile, with the aim of becoming certified as having net zero carbon emissions by 2026. When I visited, they had just started to measure their emissions, to be able to start reducing them next year. Consigning the camp’s generator to the past when the first watts of hydroelectric power come online are a big part of that project.
The future?
I left my stay at Patagonia Camp feeling buoyed by everything I had seen there. It was clear that overcoming the challenges of leaving the lightest footprint possible on the environment was no easy task. Being a trailfinder never is. It’s taken more than a decade for the camp to find a workable solution to the problems of generating clean energy. But it has refused to be beaten – and through its relationships with other camps, hotels and partners in Torres del Paine, it is keen to share what it’s learned and encourage others along the journey. At a time when Torres del Paine is threatened by overtourism, that message feels more urgent than ever.
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