Qualla: Huilo-Huilo Biological Reserve

Huilo-Huilo Biological Reserve: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a hotel here that looks like it grew out of the forest floor rather than being built on it. The Montaña Mágica Lodge rises as a moss-cloaked cone, its windows peering out like eyes under shaggy green brows, and from its summit a waterfall spills down the rock instead of lava. It is the strangest and most photographed thing in the Huilo-Huilo Biological Reserve, a private nature reserve and ecotourism area in southern Chile's Los Ríos Region, near the village of Neltume on the road toward the Hua Hum Pass and the Argentine border. But the lodge is only the doorway into something larger.

Huilo-Huilo Biological Reserve: A Forest Built for Wonder

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Huilo-Huilo sprawls across the eastern slopes of Mocho-Choshuenco, a glacial compound stratovolcano whose flanks feed the reserve's many waterfalls. This is Valdivian temperate rainforest, one of the rare and ancient forest types on Earth, dense with ferns and southern beech. The...

Huilo-Huilo Biological Reserve: The Creatures Coming Back

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What makes Huilo-Huilo more than a theme of green is what lives in it. Huemul, the endangered South Andean deer that appears on Chile's coat of arms, were reintroduced to the reserve in 2005 from the southern Aysén region, and guanaco have been brought back as well. Researchers m...

Huilo-Huilo Biological Reserve: From Sawmill to Sanctuary

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This land was not always a refuge. Through the 1960s and 1970s the area around Neltume was timber country, home to a strong movement of lumberjacks and campesino workers tied to the great state forestry operations of the Panguipulli district. That history turned violent. In 1981,...

Huilo-Huilo Biological Reserve: One Owner's Reinvention

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The transformation from logging to tourism is largely the work of one man. Víctor Petermann, a Chilean businessman who came to acquire vast forestry holdings in the Los Ríos region, established the Huilo-Huilo reserve and steered the local economy away from felling trees and towa...