The cups are a lesson in deep time. They were not blasted or dug; they were dissolved and scoured, the river grinding its way through volcanic basalt grain by grain across millions of years until it had sculpted seven consecutive basins and seven small cascades, the drops ranging from a meter to about ten and a half. The park protects 5,147 hectares of this carved mountain country, climbing from roughly 650 meters at the canyon floor to 2,600 meters on the heights. It is forest almost the whole way up, a green roof over the white noise of falling water.

On February 27, 2010, the Maule earthquake, one of the most powerful ever recorded, tore through central Chile. In the days after, visitors arrived at Radal Siete Tazas to find the unthinkable: the Seven Cups had emptied. The quake is thought to have opened a fissure in the rock that let the river drain away into an underground aquifer, and for a time the park's signature wonder was a dry stone staircase. Nature, given time, repaired itself. The water found its course again, the cups refilled, and the falls returned. It was a reminder that even a feature carved over millions of years can be undone, and remade, in a single restless instant.

The whole basin is cloaked in Nothofagus, the southern beeches that define Chilean montane forest, including the threatened Nothofagus glauca and Nothofagus leonii. Rarer trees hide among them, like the Chilean cedar Austrocedrus chilensis. Overhead, if you are lucky, you may hear the harsh call of the tricahue, an endangered local subspecies of the burrowing parrot, flashing color across the canopy. Two taller waterfalls add to the spectacle: the Velo de Novia, the Bridal Veil, plunging forty meters, and La Leona, the Lioness, dropping twenty. The forest, the parrots, and the falling water belong to one another here.

The way in starts at the town of Molina, about 55 kilometers and an hour distant by an old but reliable bus. The essential walk is the Sendero Salto La Leona, a short 1.2-kilometer trail that delivers you past all seven basins to the lip of the Leona falls. For more, the long Sendero Valle del Indio climbs all day through forest to the high plateau. Thoughtfully, a 300-meter boardwalk lets people with disabilities reach a viewpoint over the seven cups, so the park's best moment is not reserved for the able-bodied. Above it all looms the decapitated cone of Descabezado Grande, the 3,953-meter volcano that gives this corner of the Andes its raw, geologic edge.