Category: Epic Adventures

Note: This article was updated on 14 November 2024 In July 2024, Chilean authorities announced that the Las Guardas Bridge, a key crossing point along the O Circuit trail in Torres del Paine National Park, had been seriously damaged by winter avalanches. We are pleased to announce that thanks to the support of Swoop customers, […]

The trees outside my window were bent double by the wind, a permanent reminder of what a tough place Patagonia can sometimes be to make a home. I was on Navarino Island in Chilean Tierra del Fuego, and I was waiting to see the dentist.  Not just any dentist – my teeth were actually just […]

There’s a common idea that a meal at the best restaurants should come with a side order of drama. Dinner served up from a theatrically pretentious menu perhaps, or from a red-faced celebrity chef shouting orders at his harassed crew. They certainly don’t come from a remote cabin that looks like a fisherman’s shack and […]

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 […]

Torres del Paine is the most popular hiking destination in Patagonia by quite some way. In the height of the trekking season in the long summer days of January and February, hundreds of hikers hit its trails every day to enjoy some of the most spectacular landscapes in South America. The popularity of routes like […]

At Swoop, we like to think that no one knows Patagonia better than us. Every year we send our team out across the region to experience the best of Patagonia – and that’s on top of the many members of our team who already live there, from Bariloche and Pucon in the north down to […]

The temperature hit me like a mugger carrying a hot wet towel. I had started my day taking breakfast nearly 1600 miles (2500 km) away on Argentina’s Patagonian Atlantic coast at Peninsula Valdes, where the morning sun came with the threat of a sharp wind off the sea. Now, as I stepped onto the scorchingly […]

I was having lunch at the Iceberg Lagoon when I realised just how different this trek was to what I’d anticipated. The setting was extraordinary: I was high in the mountains surrounded by a giant circle of rocky peaks, with the last patches of winter snow still tucked into their crevices. Between two of them […]