Qualla: Pali-Aike National Park

Pali-Aike National Park: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Tehuelche named it Pali-Aike, the Desolate Place, and standing among its black lava fields and burned-out craters it is easy to see why. This is a landscape that looks scorched, a scatter of more than four hundred volcanic cones and explosion craters spreading across the steppe near the Strait of Magellan, the rock here capped with lava that hardened in geologically recent times. But desolation is only the surface. Beneath one of these craters lies a cave that has preserved the memory of some of the earliest people in South America, who sheltered, hunted, and buried their dead here at the very end of the last Ice Age.

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Pali-Aike National Park: A Land Forged by Fire

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pali-Aike National Park covers about 5,030 hectares in Chile's Magallanes Region, established in 1970 to protect a place unlike anywhere else in the country. The Pali-Aike volcanic field is a sea of basalt: more than 450 cinder cones, maars where ancient eruptions blasted craters...

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Pali-Aike National Park: The Cave of the First People

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Inside the Pali-Aike Crater, a cave holds one of the most significant archaeological records in South America. Stone tools recovered here date to around 11,000 years before present, placing them among the oldest on the continent. Junius Bird, the American archaeologist who also s...

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Pali-Aike National Park: Those Who Were Laid to Rest

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Among the cave's most moving discoveries are three cremated human skeletons, the remains of people who lived and died here at the close of the Pleistocene. Their cremation suggests care, a deliberate rite performed for the dead by a community that, however thinly it was spread ac...

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Pali-Aike National Park: Hunters of Giants

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The people of Pali-Aike shared their world with animals now long extinct. They hunted the Mylodon, the giant ground sloth, and a native American horse, alongside guanaco, fox, puma, birds, and rodents, and they gathered the eggs of the rhea, the great flightless bird of the stepp...

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