The Andes Mountains are ancient. They’ve formed a rampart down the spine of South America for around 14 million years. In Chile, they’ve helped form landscapes as wildly diverse as the Atacama Desert on its high altitude plateau, the ragged and glacier-draped coastline of the Chilean Fjords, and of course the great granite peaks of Torres del Paine.
But there is one part of Chile that I had heard truly captures the essence of deep time, where there are trees whose years are counted in millennia and where you can see the Earth’s geological processes reshaping the landscape in real time. Pumalín, Chile’s very own Jurassic Park, where the land had been devastated by a massive volcanic eruption, but was now starting to turn green again
Pumalín
Chile’s national parks are a relatively modern creation. Its first national park, Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park in the Chilean Lake District celebrates its centenary in 2026, but Pumalín National Park is a real newcomer, being less than 20 years old. This offers visitors something of the atmosphere of being a pioneer, especially since it’s a difficult place to get to by road. I live in Pucón, on the edge of the Chilean Lake District, which meant the easiest way to get there was by air, flying into the tiny airport at Chaitén on the sort of plane that was so small that they weigh you and your luggage together to prevent overloading.
What makes Pumalín special is that it was the first national park created by the Tompkins Foundation. In the late 1980, the US philanthropists Doug and Kristine Tompkins started buying up land here as part of an extensive private conservation and rewilding project. That purchase wasn’t without controversy, with some people complaining that Chile had effectively been cut in two by a private citizen, as the land the Tompkins bought stretched from the Argentinian border to the Chilean fjords on the Pacific coast. But in 2017 the land was donated to the state and formally declared a national park. It’s now part of the Route of the Parks network that runs the length of southern Patagonia.
The thing that made Pumalín such an attractive place to establish a national park was its ancient and largely untouched Valdivian rainforest – a temperate rainforest that contained staggering biodiversity with an unusually high number of endemic species. Prize among these was the alerce trees, a type of redwood that can live for thousands of years, but which had been logged out in other parts of the country for its valuable timber.
Ancient rainforest
I based myself in a lodge in the coastal town of Caleta Gonzalo, an hour’s drive from the park entrance at Chaitén. For here it was easy to explore the park on the series of day hiking trails that led through the forest and up into the mountains. Each one offered the opportunity to see what the old growth forest really looked like.
It was an extraordinary landscape of riotous growth. Every square metre was overflowing with life. There were ferns with immense fronds and enormous stands of bamboo, the tips of their leaves dripping with moisture. Everything was covered in green – branches carpeted with moss and tree trunks wrapped up in lichen or dotted with fungi. And above us, thick tall lenga trees and immense ancient alerces stretching up into a canopy so thick and high it was hard to judge where the forest really ended.
It felt truly ancient, like a scene from Jurassic Park. If a dinosaur had poked its head out from behind a tree, I’m not sure how surprised I would have been. Instead, I concentrated on the sound of water and bird song coming from the undergrowth. Spotting wildlife in a setting like this was hard, but every now and then I’d get a jewelled flash of a tiny hummingbird.
The day hikes themselves were very relaxed. This wasn’t a raw landscape like southern Patagonia, where you can test yourself against the elements and find yourself dwarfed by the wilderness. Pumalín felt more welcoming – its rugged landscape somehow cushioned by the greenery. And while I still felt tiny against the giant alerce trees, it was the welcoming feeling of being wrapped in Mother Nature’s embrace; an embrace that had stood here for millennia. So what was this I had heard about the damage wrought by a local volcano?
Chaitén erupts
Chaitén isn’t just the town at the entrance to the national park, it’s the name of the volcano that dominates the local area. With all the lush greenery, it was initially easy for me to miss. I know exactly what a volcano should look like because in my part of Chile, we have plenty of them, dotted across the northern Chilean Lake District, all looking cartoonishly like a child had drawn them: each one with a neat cone, dressed with a crown of snow.
Chaitén Volcano is not like this at all, not remotely. It looks like a great monster took a great bite out of a mountain leaving behind a caldera that’s a couple of miles wide. But this was no tiddy nibble. On May 2 200, Chaitén erupted. Its cone disintegrated with explosive force, sending a cloud of pulverised rock in all directions and a vast plume of ash high into the sky. It was the first time in 9000 years that the volcano has been so violently active.
The town of Chaitén was immediately evacuated. Only one person died during the evacuation, but when the outflow from the volcano caused a river to burst its banks, the town was flooded with a thick layer of muddy ash. Chaitén had to be almost completely rebuilt, along with the nearby town of Amarillo, which has become a centre for community regeneration projects, in part with the assistance of the Tompkins Foundation.
Hike to the crater
Chaitén has slept ever since, and I was excited to have the opportunity to climb it. After the relaxing forest trails it was a chance to give my calf muscles a bit more of a test, as well as seeing how the area has regenerated in the 26 years since the great violence of the eruption.
The evidence of the cataclysm was everywhere. As we climbed, half of the forest seemed to be made up of the bleached and naked trunks of trees killed by the volcanic ash. They stood against the sky like an army of abandoned telephone poles. Away from the marked trail, more felled trees littered the ground.
With scenes like this, in the immediate years after the volcano it must surely have seemed as if the land would never recover. But it did. The mineral-rich volcanic deposits and the plentiful rain soon turned the land green again. Trees take time to rise again from these literal ashes, but it wasn’t long before I found myself climbing through a riot of giant ferns. Dotted among them, young trees were almost ready to break out above the dead trunks of their cousins. In the undergrowth, old wood was carpeted with moss. were already covered in moss. Everything was damp, verdant and hopeful.
On the higher slopes, the vegetation thinned out where the volcanic scree was too steep to get a purchase on. Where we walked then flattened out so that we could look into the vast caldera, which was now flooded. It was an eerie sight – acres of pumice, flecked with obsidian looming over a silent lake. There was the faintest hint of smoke coming from what remained of the collapsed cone, but just enough to make me happy we couldn’t get any closer.
As I gazed down into the lake, it was hard not to be humbled. As an example of how powerful the geological forces are that shape our planet, Chaitén Volcano was undeniably impressive, but it had also destroyed people’s homes and livelihood. But it was nicer yet to descend and see what happens when Mother Nature takes her turn and carpets the earth with greenery again – and see the new shoots rise in one of Chile’s most beautiful national parks.
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