Southern Exposure

At the windswept extreme of South America, the iconic Torres del Paine are the centrepiece of Chilean Patagonia. But after 60 years of tourist attention, does the famous W Trek still do the region justice? Phoebe Smith went to find out.

RAINBOWS DANCED across the water while the wind whipped up a spray and sprinkled it like liquid glitter on the surrounding landscape. I watched, mesmerised, as it sparkled incandescently in the dimming sunlight. At my feet, the impossible cobalt colour of the lake contrasted brilliantly with the deep red flowers of the surrounding fire bushes.

As birthday celebrations go, I mused, this one would certainly take some beating. But this wasn’t my party. Here in Chilean Patagonia, the Torres del Paine National Park was celebrating the big 6-0.

Having been fascinated since childhood by photos of the tripled-horned crown at the centre of this wild steppe (the huge impossibly vertical granite towers – or torres – that give the park its name), I had wanted to come and tread its trails for as long as I could remember – probably since back when it was a mere thirty-something, still finding its feet. Now that it was older, wiser, and, let’s be honest, much more established in walking circles, I did worry that perhaps in its more mature years it may have lost a little of its lustre.

So it was with slight trepidation that I booked myself into the visitors’ office, signing up to walk the famous 55km ‘W Trek’ as a way of acknowledging its milestone age.

Though the park itself has now racked up six decades of existence, the landscape inside its man-made boundaries has, of course, existed for many millennia. The rock of the Torres del Paine began life over 12 million years earlier as compressed granite that began to ‘cook’, and the shardlike shapes of the towers known as Torre Sur (2850m), Torre Central (2800m) and Torre Notre (2600m) were created by the erosive action of a massive glacier during the last Ice Age. This geological make-up gives the peaks a striking banded appearance, with a dark metamorphic topping above white granite.