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 fine. But I was at Errante Ecolodge, run by Jorge Carlos, who moved here in 2011 to run the island’s only dental practice. In the years since, he has slowly built the lodge step by step, to offer a showcase to the island’s attractions in as low impact and sustainable a way as possible, as well as providing an important amenity to the community.
Building sustainably
“It all started by accommodating people where I lived through Couchsurfing, which made me think that there was a need for tourist accommodation,” Jorge told me the evening that I arrived at the lodge. “Initially, the idea was to have volunteer workers. It was going to be a hostel, but when the guests began to arrive they started to define what we could do, which was to offer accommodation, along with food and activities.”
Errante certainly doesn’t look like a simple hostel. It’s a long and low wooden building that curves in a gentle arc on a low ridge overlooking the Beagle Channel. Floor to ceiling windows offer continuous views out across the water to the mountains on the Argentinian side of Tierra del Fuego. We were sitting in the communal dining area, where guests could eat together around a long table in a laid back and sociable atmosphere.
Jorge explained how the ethos at Errante Ecolodge had developed. “We designed everything on our own, according to the location. The idea was to spend our money only in Puerto Williams and hire local people.” This threw up challenges when it came to running the lodge off grid, which Jorge was determined to do in as low impact a way as possible. “Energy generation had to come from renewable sources. At first we worked with local firewood, but because a lot of heating was required we moved away from that for conservation reasons.” Pointing to the ceiling, he said that the roof was now covered with solar panels that can generate 15 kilowatts of electricity. That’s more than enough to run the lodge during the quiet winter, but plans to install the island’s first heat pumps had to be put on hold by the Pandemic. For the moment, gas is used to supplement the solar generation to provide extra heating for guests.
Meeting the community
The next day I saw just how embedded in the local community Errante really is. Jorge appeared after breakfast in his dental scrubs, having just seen a patient. The lodge is home to Puerto Williams’ dentist surgery. This was at the heart of what Jorge was trying to do with Errante, with the sustainability ethic of the lodge put at the service of the local community. After changing into outdoor gear, he took me on a walking tour of the town.
Puerto Williams is a village compared to the Argentinian city of Ushuaia that sits across the Beagle Channel. Until Covid, there was a direct ferry that linked the two, but services have still yet to resume. I arrived by sailing boat, but most people fly in and out on a shuttle from Punta Arenas, a 45 minute hop away.
It’s the sort of easygoing town where you feel like if you stayed a few days you’d end up knowing everyone. All the locals certainly knew their dentist, and our tour was frequently interrupted with introductions to local fishermen or personnel from the local naval base – and offers of drinks at one of the town’s bars. Tourism is relatively new here and Jorge was keen to give visitors as personal an experience as possible – as well as show his neighbours how tourists can benefit the community. We called in at the church and the oldest house in town (Puerto Williams was only founded in the 1850s), as well as a fascinating and very professionally run museum.
The highlight here was the display dedicated to the Navarino’s Yaghan inhabitants. The Yaghan were incomparable experts when it came to navigating the waters and inlets of Tierra del Fuego, living on fish, shellfish, seals and even whales. They kept fires in their canoes and greased their bodies with seal fat to protect themselves against the wind. Dressed in my modern hiking gear, I felt rather feeble in comparison.
With the Yaghan
As Jorge told me about the Yaghan, he finished with one important point. Along with a lot of visitors, I had assumed that the Yaghan people could only be encountered in museums and history books – another sad footnote in the bloody encounter between Europeans and indigenous people in the Americas. But this isn’t so. The Yaghan story is one of survival and defiance in face of attempts to consign them to the past. Yaghan culture has survived on Navarino island.
The next day we went horse riding with Nelson Guenel González. As we saddled up, he told me that he was the grandson of Cristina Calderón Harban, a Yaghan elder who had been wrongly fashioned in the media as the last true speaker of Yaghan language until her death two years ago at the age of 93. Nelson was living proof of how wrong that narrative was. He explained how the Yaghan had persisted on Chilean territory much longer than on the Argentinian side and that now there was an opportunity to show how their ancestors lived – and that the Yaghan remain a living people with deep ties to their land, despite losing some of their customs due to colonialism. For Jorge, working with local guides like Nelson was integral to what he is trying to achieve with Errante.
The longer I stayed on Navarino, the more those ties became apparent. On a kayaking excursion around the bays of the Onachaga Channel, I was again thankful for my modern clothes and admired how people could have thrived here in sealskin garments. On almost every shore we paddled along, we could see large piles of oyster and mussel shells known as middens, discarded over the years and centuries by generations of Yaghan here. We were careful not to land anywhere near them and disturb such previous archaeological remains.
Later in the week, after tasting the first day of the wildly ferocious Dientes de Navarino trek (like Torres del Paine’s O Circuit on steroids), we had planned a boat trip out to take a peak at Glacier Alley. Charles Darwin sailed through here in the 1830s (his famous ship is what gave the Beagle Channel its name) and had rhapsodised about the sapphire blues of its ice cliffs. But we were foiled by rough seas, and instead diverted to a peninsula where a family that Jorge knew lived. He’d even done some dental work for them.
There was a single house emerging from where the thick forest met the sea. It was home to a family of four, who were almost as self-sufficient as their Yaghan ancestors, with the added advantage of a clear line of sight to a cell phone tower. Within an hour, as the weather cleared, we were sitting around a roaring fire, with a whole lamb roasting in a traditional asado style. Jorge had clearly been able to call ahead. It was the perfect way to close out my trip – with a family on a tiny peninsula in the middle of the Beagle Channel, celebrating a traditional culture with good food and new friends.
As we ate, Jorge swept his hand around to take in the scenery, as if to explain why he had built Errante in the way he had, and worked with the local community to make Navarino his home. “There are very few places where nature is the protagonist but this is one of them, where nature invites you to be part of a moment. You always have to understand that it’s very fragile, but it’s like a reservoir where you can arrive and feel that we are part of a much greater concept.”
Looking around, it was very hard to disagree.
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