Qualla: Alerce Costero National Park

Alerce Costero National Park: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yiyo Zamorano, CC BY-SA 4.0. Somewhere in this forest stands a tree that was already ancient when Rome was a cluster of huts on the Tiber. Its name is the Alerce Milenario, the Thousand-Year Tree, though the name undersells it badly. When scientists counted its growth rings in 1993, they reached 3,622 years before the borer ran out of trunk. In 2022, a Chilean researcher cored what he could and ran the math on the rest, and arrived at a startling possibility: roughly 5,400 years, which would make this single living organism older than any tree yet found on Earth. It rises here, in the Cordillera Pelada of southern Chile, hidden in a damp ravine where the Pacific fog never fully lifts.

Image: Yiyo Zamorano | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alerce Costero National Park: The Patient Giants

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yiyo Zamorano, CC BY-SA 4.0. The tree the world is arguing over is a Fitzroya cupressoides, the alerce, and the park takes its name from it. These conifers grow with almost inhuman slowness, adding rings so thin that millennia can pass before the trunk thickens to the width of a car. The Alerce Milenario is ...

Image: Yiyo Zamorano | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alerce Costero National Park: A Refuge Through Catastrophe

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bahnhofsralf, CC BY-SA 4.0. This mountainous coast did something extraordinary during the last Ice Age: it survived. When glaciers ground across much of southern Chile during the Quaternary, the Cordillera Pelada served as a refuge, a pocket of life that the ice never fully claimed. Later it weathered the r...

Image: Bahnhofsralf | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alerce Costero National Park: The Bald Mountains

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marco Lineros, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Cordillera Pelada means the Bald Mountains, and the name is a scar. Between roughly 1750 and 1943, as Spaniards, Chileans, and European settlers pushed into the land between Valdivia and the Maullín River, they set fire to the alerce woods again and again. The burns stripped ...

Image: Marco Lineros | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alerce Costero National Park: Life in the Understory

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lycaon.cl, CC BY-SA 3.0. Beneath the canopy moves a cast of creatures shaped for this specific place. The güiña, or kodkod, slips through the brush as one of the smallest wild cats in the Americas, while pumas range the higher ground. The pudú, a deer barely knee-high, picks through the undergrowth, and ...

Image: Lycaon.cl | CC BY-SA 3.0