My Private Park: A different view of Magallanes

By Ellen Jones

Hotel Explorer Torres del Paine National Park

A privileged number of tourists have just had the most breathtaking holiday of their lives – for free.

Obliged to stay four extra days in the most beautiful national park in all of Chile, the world famous Torres del Paine, visitors can hardly believe their luck.

“It looked like something out of a dream”, admits Roberta Salvatti, who enjoyed an extended stay at luxury Hotel Explora, “we had the park almost entirely to ourselves”.

Chile’s most stunning geographical feature, the iconic Torres del Paine peaks, loom above a piercingly turquoise lake. Only approachable by a single path, access to the park was blocked as local protesters barricaded the road on January 11th.

Being high season, January and February are usually the busiest months of the year, with thousands of people entering the park every day. This year, however, it was almost emptied as the roadblocks prevented backpackers from seeing those longed-for views.

Roberta and her family have enjoyed an unexpectedly prolonged stay at one of Chile’s most luxurious hotels. With more than twice as many staff as guests, what might have been conceived as an inconvenience has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Those stuck in the hotel were adamant the Explora staff were doing “the very best they could for their guests” to ensure they still got the “Explora experience”. Described repeatedly in Spanish as “super-bien!”, the staff clearly made quite an impact.

“What we noticed most was the silence,” Roberta tells us, “we became very sensitive to the smallest sound. There were no cars, no traffic, no people – we could hear a little avalanche from miles away”.

With five star Hotel Explora as the only hotel at the very centre of the park, Torres del Paine has been transformed into a playground for the rich.

Horse riding in Torres del Paine National Park

Whether horse-riding or trekking, kayaking or fly-fishing, the guests’ only companions were wild deer and llamas. The perpetually snow-covered peaks were picture perfect without any strangers marring the view.

For travellers with a taste for adventure, their trip got unexpectedly even better. The Chilean military evacuated a large group of stranded tourists by air – the perfect impromptu adrenaline rush, not to the mention staggering birds-eye-views. “It was fun, a real adventure,” one passenger tells us, “the plane flew really low, so we could see exactly what was going on in the protests and demonstrations. I think my kids enjoyed the flight even more than the rest of the trip!”

For those who love the great outdoors, having the enormous expanse of emptiness that surrounds the peaks all to themselves is more than they’d hoped for. Many walkers trekked along the border, trying to find their own way out of the park. Good-humoured local protesters offer them soup and apples, along with a friendly smile as they pass by the demonstrations.

The seven days of strike action in Punta Arenas and Puerto Natales, the two main cities in Chile’s Magallanes region, was prompted by the announcement of a 3% rise in natural gas prices. (ILC NEWS Jan 18, 2011) The rise will be implemented from the 1st February, and citizens of Magallanes, the coldest and Southern-most region in the country, feel they will be unfairly hit by the rise.

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