Torres del Paine

Torres del Paine is Chile's most famous national park, located in the chilean Patagonia, close to the border with Argentina. Images coming from this park symbolize and advertise Patagonia all over the world. It has huge granite formations, blue-coloured lakes, patagonian forest and even a glaciar. The best way to take the most out of the park is to walk for several days. It has well kept and identified paths and circuits, allowing you to do daily treks or circuits of 3 and up to 7 days. There are campsites and lodges along the different circuits, where you can rest and stay for the night. Everything is very well organized and it really should be an outstanding experience to spend a week walking through such a place, something I definitely want to do before leaving Chile.


This time, the weather was bad and we were too many, so we decided to go just for the day and do one of the treks, a 4-hour walk/climb up to the granite towers that name the park. We drove to the beginning of the path and then left the cars and started exercising. It is not a very difficult hike, but it definitely requires some good physical condition. It was very windy and cold, but fortunately it didn't rain much during the way. Though it is high season, we didn't find many people along the way and could walk up to 20 minutes without seeing anyone. What I found most amazing about this park is that it is very well taken care of even with all the visitors it gets. We could smell the forest, feel the pure air around you and fill our bottles from the different water streams along the way.


The last hour of walk was the toughest, but in the end we arrived at the base of the towers, a rewarding view of the three granite pillars surrounded by snow and a beautiful small lake at the bottom, from the melted snow. The weather here was crazy. In the half hour we spent on top, it rained, it hailed, we had fog, we had sun and I had the fingertips frozen. We then had to do the same path back, which we did a bit faster and arrived back at the cars at around 10pm. This is another interesting feature of Patagonia. Due to its high latitude, it was still day at 10pm and, at midnight, you could still see some light in the sky...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Muito fixe sem dúvida.

Podías ter feito 1 vídeo e passar no canal Travel ou Discovery. :P

Sadino said...

LOL, vou pensar nisso...