Qualla: Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park

Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ninovolador, CC BY-SA 4.0. When an American businessman started buying up Patagonian rainforest in the 1990s, Chileans were not sure whether to be grateful or alarmed. Some neighbors said he meant to clear the cattle and stock the land with American bison. Others whispered that the forest was destined to become a nuclear waste dump, or that a foreigner owning a strip of land from the Argentine border to the Pacific amounted to cutting the country in half. The man was Douglas Tompkins, who had made his fortune founding The North Face and co-founding the clothing brand Esprit, and what he actually intended was the opposite of exploitation. He wanted to protect one of the last temperate rainforests on Earth that still runs unbroken all the way to the sea, and then, eventually, to give it away.

Image: Ninovolador | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park: A Mountaineer's Long Game

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enidan7, CC BY-SA 3.0. Tompkins had been coming to Patagonia since the early 1960s, drawn by its mountains and rivers, and he chose to act rather than merely admire. In 1991 he bought a large, semi-abandoned tract in the Reñihué River valley of Chile's Palena province, some 17,000 hectares of mostly pr...

Image: Enidan7 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park: The Forest That Reaches the Ocean

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cristian Barahona Miranda, CC BY-SA 3.0. The land was worth the effort. The Valdivian temperate rainforest that blankets Pumalín is among the wettest forests on the planet, soaking up roughly 6,000 millimeters of rain a year along its coast, and unlike almost anywhere else, these original forests run unbroken all the wa...

Image: Cristian Barahona Miranda | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park: Winning the Neighbors

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bas Wallet, CC BY 2.0. Conservation here was as much a social project as an ecological one. Large-scale private land buying for parks was familiar in the United States but new and unsettling in Chile, and the early suspicion ran deep. The Tompkinses set out to change that by including the people who li...

Image: Bas Wallet | CC BY 2.0

Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park: The Largest Gift of Its Kind

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Winniccxx, CC BY 3.0. Doug Tompkins did not live to see the final act; he died in a kayaking accident in 2015. But the plan he and Kris had built held. In 2017 the couple's foundation reached an accord with the Chilean state, and in 2018 Pumalín was formally combined with public land and donated to th...

Image: Winniccxx | CC BY 3.0