A road trip is one of the great dreams of travel. It’s no wonder that time and again songwriters have returned to the idea of a car and a highway that stretches on forever as the ultimate promise of freedom. Bruce Springsteen practically built a career on the idea, and everyone knows that Route 66 is the place to go to get your kicks.
Many roads have become iconic travel destinations in themselves, from the Garden Route in South Africa and Australia’s Great Ocean Road to the Icelandic Ring Road and California’s Pacific Highway through Big Sur. But other roads that are just as dramatic continue to lie just below the travel radar. Foremost among these is Chile’s Carretera Austral, the most spectacular highway in South America – and we believe – one of the best road trips in the world.
Where is the Carretera Austral?
The Carretera Austral is literally ‘the Southern Highway’, running from Puerto Montt in the Chilean Lake District to Villa O’Higgins 789 miles (1270 km) away in southern Patagonia. It runs like a vein through Chile’s Aysen, through an almost bewildering array of landscapes. At its northern end the highway is clad in thick temperate rain forest, before skirting the edge of some almost Scandinavian fjords. Inland, it skirts epic mountain ranges topped with snow and glaciers, and winds through broad river valleys and wide turquoise rivers. In the far south, the terrain can almost evoke the African savannah in place.
It’s this diversity that makes the Carretera Austral such a thrilling destination. There is always a new vista around the next bend in the road. And bends there are aplenty. The Romans might have been some of history’s great road builders, but they liked to build highways that ran as straight as an arrow from A to B. The Carretera Austral would have given them a meltdown. There’s barely a straight line anywhere along its course.
That lack of an obvious path explains why Aysen was considered the most isolated of all Chile’s regions ever since independence. The landscape was just too challenging for largescale road construction, so many remote towns were only accessible by boat or worse – only connected to the outside world by crossing the border into Argentina. There were piecemeal attempts to build roads linking the main towns, but it wasn’t until the 1970s and the Pinochet dictatorship that a plan was announced to create a single highway as an explicit nation-building project to bring even the remotest parts of the country into the orbit of the state.
The project took nearly three decades to complete, but even as the last stretch of road was levelled, there was an acceptance that the Carretera Austral is unlikely to ever be truly finished. Only the northern half of the highway—from Puerto Montt to Coyhaique—is paved. The southern portion remains gravel, and the extremes of the winter freeze-thaw cycles mean that it’s likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future. It’s a potent reminder of the power of Mother Nature, but also one of the great attractions of a road trip here: you truly do feel like you’re exploring a brand new frontier.
What to do along the Carretera Austral
The Carretera Austral makes up a significant part of Chile’s Route of the Parks, a loose chain of 17 national parks that run through Chilean Patagonia. As such, it’s home to some of the region’s—and therefore South America’s—best scenery.
The far north of the Carretera Austral skirts alongside or passes through three national parks where ancient alerce trees tower over the landscape, and offer hikes through dripping green temperate rainforest. Alerce Andino, Hornopirén and Pumalín National Parks are all studded with lakes and wetlands amid the forests, and the Carretera Austral here can feel positively vertiginous at times. The landscape is so extreme as it passes along the coastal fjords that there is often no room for a road at all, so ferries remain a crucial part of the transport network here.
As you head south, the temperatures in the mountains cool and glaciers become more apparent, in places like Queulat National Park. From here the mountains rise up into great ramparts as you approach the regional capital at Coyhaique. This town, connected to Chile’s capital city Santiago is the traditional entry point for most travellers to Aysen, and those unlucky enough not to have the time to drive the highway’s entire length.
South of Coyhaique, the Carretera Austral winds its way through some of Patagonia’s best trekking country, not least the spectacular Cerro Castillo National Park, where the trails are as impressive as anything in Torres del Paine, but the trails are virtually empty. In fact, the terrain is so impressive anywhere along whole swathes of the highway that you’d almost be forgiven for pulling up your vehicle anywhere and heading into the mountains.
There is great natural beauty to be found as the Carretera Austral nudges past the shore of Lag General Carrera, through pretty hamlets you might almost mistake for being on Lake Como in Italy. This is where you’ll find the Instagram-hungry Marble Caves and, nearby, the great white cliffs of San Rafael Glacier, which calves icebergs straight into a green lagoon.
From here, it’s a short hop to Patagonia National Park. This is one of Chile’s newest national parks, and the creation of an epic rewilding project, restoring the balance of nature to an area once known for logging and ranching. When you see wild guanacos outside your window in the lodge in the centre of the park, it’s easy to judge how successful that project has been.
As you head south from Patagonia National Park past Cochrane and the Baker River (a great place for kayaking), it’s a clear run all the way south to Villa O’Higgins and the end of the line. As the traffic dwindles, your vehicle feels increasingly like a tiny dot on a massive canvas. It’s the feeling of the true frontier. This is a land for adventurers and long-distance cyclists: to continue on from here means leaving the vehicle behind and crossing as a foot passenger by ferry into Argentina, where Los Glaciares National Park rises up in all its drama to envelop you.
Self-driving the Carretera Austral?
The rugged nature of the Carretera Austral is undoubtedly a strong part of its allure, but driving its length is certainly not for the fainthearted. As a rule, we recommend hiring a car with a guide while travelling the highway. There are plenty of very remote stretches along the Carretera Austral, and it’s easy to find yourself in trouble in an area where you’re a long way from the nearest phone signal – or the next passing car.
If you are going to self-drive on the Carretera Austral, there are some important points to keep in mind. For vehicle rental you should only ever hire a 4WD with a high wheel base. Check the vehicle carefully before departing, making sure that it has a neumático (spare tire) and una gata (a car jack). It’s absolutely essential to carry extra food and water, and fill the tank with gas whenever you can: especially along the southern stretch of highway, gas stations are few and far between, and there are none between Cochrane and Villa O’Higgins. The same goes for money: bring plenty of cash and don’t expect to be able to use ATMs except in Coyhaique.
In terms of road etiquette, always give oncoming vehicles plenty of space, particularly trucks. There is a lot of loose gravel on the road, and it’s easy to either skid or suffer a chipped windscreen. This is something we’ve learned at our own cost: one member of the Swoop Patagonia team was forced onto the gravel shoulder when an approaching truck was taking up more than its fair share of the highway. Even though they slowed to a crawl, the car then slid down the shoulder at an angle. The car was impossible to right, and it took the intervention of another car to help pull it out. The Carretera Austral being what it is, it took nearly an hour for another hour for a vehicle to pass for us to flag down.
In which case, we’ll add another road rule: stop if someone looks like they could do with some help. Thankfully, our Swooper was a Spanish speaker so all was well, but it would have been easy to have been stranded for a lot longer. Having some back up is one reason why an English-speaking guide is recommended here – as well as being experienced on the road, they can jump into action on your behalf, whether that’s helping stop traffic or activating a contingency plan should it look like you’re going to miss a ferry connection or your next activity a bit further down the road.
The heart of Aysen
The Carretera Austral isn’t merely a road. It’s the heart of Aysen, where at every turn you can see a new facet of Chile’s wildest region—a vista to hike to, a forest to reconnect to nature in, or just a landscape that seems to unfold forever. While you’re there it’s no surprise that it took so long to even come up with the concept of the highway, and after that, so long to build. This is a part of Patagonia where nature always seems to come first, and where humanity’s touch seems the lightest—just a thin ribbon of tarmac and gravel, and an invitation to explore on what is surely one of the world’s greatest road trips.
*
