Category: Planning & Tips

Patagonia is somewhere that’s synonymous with adventure. It’s about rugged landscapes, snowy mountains, and a great untamed wilderness. It’s why we love it. But one question we often get asked at Swoop is how safe is Patagonia for a solo female traveller? Well, as just that – a solo female who has spent over 18 […]

If you visit one region on your trip to Patagonia, it will almost certainly be Torres del Paine National Park. Located in southern Chile, Torres del Paine is the crown jewel and hiking hub of Patagonia. Its iconic landscape is a quintessential postcard view, the image you conjure when your mind hears the word ‘Patagonia’: […]

Wetlands are some of the world’s most important carbon sinks. Marshy areas soak up atmospheric carbon far more quickly than trees, to the extent that as well as being crucial biodiversity hotspots, wetlands collectively store twice as much carbon as all the forests in the world.  These wetlands don’t just have to be vast areas […]

It’s a story as old as humanity itself: the conflict between farm and wilderness, between those raising livestock and predators looking for an easy lunch. Whether it’s ranchers and coyotes on the American plains, Maasai herders and lions, or shepherds versus wolves in the mountains of Europe, the question always remains: can people, livestock and […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s something of a cliché to say that Patagonia is a destination for carnivores. If you think of Argentinian food, then the first thing you might have in mind is a big steak washed down with a glass of red wine. This is the land of the gaucho after all, where men on horseback have […]