Qualla: Huerquehue National Park

Huerquehue National Park: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pato Novoa, CC BY 2.0. Huerquehue means "the place of the messenger" in Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche. It is a fitting name for a park that feels like a dispatch from a much older world. Climb its trails above Lake Tinquilco and the forest changes around you, until you are standing among monkey puzzle trees that were already ancient when the Spanish first reached these mountains, their stiff reptilian crowns held against the Andean sky.

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Image: Pato Novoa | CC BY 2.0

Huerquehue National Park: Above the Lake District

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bas Wallet and Iñi Papi, CC BY-SA 4.0. The park lies in the foothills of the Andes, about 33 kilometres east of the resort town of Pucon and deep in the Valdivian temperate rainforest. It covers 125 square kilometres of mountainous terrain east of Caburgua Lake, climbing from around 720 metres to 2,000 metres above se...

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Image: Bas Wallet and Iñi Papi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Huerquehue National Park: A Park Older Than Its Founding

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jason Hollinger, CC BY 2.0. Huerquehue was formally created on June 9, 1967, but its conservation roots reach back further. In 1912 Chile established the enormous Benjamin Vicuna Mackenna Park, also called Colico, which sprawled across 265,000 hectares of this region. Over the following decades that vast ho...

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Image: Jason Hollinger | CC BY 2.0

Huerquehue National Park: The Ancient Pewen

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jason Hollinger, CC BY 2.0. The park's defining feature is its forest of araucaria, the tree the world calls monkey puzzle and the Mapuche call pewen. These are living fossils. Plants nearly identical to them grew 200 million years ago, in the age of dinosaurs, and a single tree can live more than a thousan...

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Image: Jason Hollinger | CC BY 2.0

Huerquehue National Park: Water Everywhere

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Roswo assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Huerquehue is a park of water as much as of trees. Rain falls heavily from May through September, more than two metres of it in a year, feeding twenty separate lakes and ponds scattered across the heights. Beyond Tinquilco and Verde lie the small lagoons the locals named one by o...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Roswo assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Huerquehue National Park: Small Survivors

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mono Andes, CC BY-SA 2.0. The forest shelters creatures as rare as its trees. The pudu, the world's smallest deer, picks its way through the undergrowth, and the guina, a small spotted wildcat, hunts unseen. Overhead the Andean condor and the Magellanic woodpecker share the airspace, while the choroy para...

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Image: Mono Andes | CC BY-SA 2.0