Qualla: Valdivian Temperate Forests

Valdivian Temperate Forests: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tomás Ravassa Coronel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Some of these trees were already a thousand years old when the Roman Empire fell. In a damp ravine in southern Chile stands an alerce called Gran Abuelo—the great-grandfather—whose growth rings were counted in 1993 to 3,622 years, making it one of the oldest living things ever measured. It belongs to the Valdivian temperate forests, a narrow green strip pinned between the Pacific and the Andes where rain falls in extraordinary quantity and life has gone its own way for millions of years. Walled off from the rest of South America by desert to the north, mountains to the east, and dry steppe beyond, this forest became an island on land—and islands breed wonders.

Image: Tomás Ravassa Coronel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Valdivian Temperate Forests: A Forest in Isolation

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LBM1948, CC BY-SA 4.0. Geography made the Valdivian forest a sanctuary. It runs as a coastal band from roughly 37 to 48 degrees south, hemmed between the ocean and the southern Andes. To the north, the Atacama—the driest desert on Earth—forms an impassable wall. To the east rise the Andes and, beyond t...

Image: LBM1948 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Valdivian Temperate Forests: Where the Rain Never Stops

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tadeoska, CC BY-SA 3.0. This is rainforest in the truest sense, drenched by winds that have crossed thousands of miles of open ocean. The westerlies sweep in off the Pacific heavy with water vapor, then slam into the windward slopes of the Coast Range and the Andes, wringing themselves out as they climb...

Image: Tadeoska | CC BY-SA 3.0

Valdivian Temperate Forests: Living Fossils and Tiny Giants

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tadeoska, CC BY-SA 3.0. The creatures here read like a naturalist's fever dream. The monito del monte, a small arboreal marsupial, is the sole survivor of an order otherwise extinct for millions of years—a true living fossil that links the marsupials of South America to those of distant Australia. Shari...

Image: Tadeoska | CC BY-SA 3.0

Valdivian Temperate Forests: The Fight to Keep It

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit poudou99, CC BY-SA 3.0. Antiquity offers no protection from a chainsaw. The Valdivian forest's greatest treasures—the towering alerce and the southern beeches called Nothofagus—are also its most vulnerable, felled and often shipped abroad as woodchips, the cleared ground replanted with fast-growing pine...

Image: poudou99 | CC BY-SA 3.0