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Patagonia
Wind, ice, and the emptiest end of the Americas
The wind is the first thing anyone notices. It pours off the southern Andes and races east across a plateau of gravel and tussock with nothing to slow it, bending trees into flags and stripping the topsoil from the steppe. Patagonia is the last thousand kilometers of the Americas, shared by Argentina and Chile below roughly the Colorado and Bio Bio rivers, and it is defined by an asymmetry: wet, glaciated and forested on the Chilean side of the mountains, dry and nearly empty on the Argentine side. Fewer than three million people live in an area larger than France and Germany combined, which is precisely why the place has come to stand, in the global imagination, for emptiness itself.
The Andes form the spine and the divide, and they are the reason the region has two faces. Their southern reach holds the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the largest body of ice outside the poles and Greenland, feeding glaciers such as Perito Moreno down into milky lakes. East of the range the rain never arrives, and the Patagonian Desert, one of the largest cold deserts on Earth, spreads in flat, wind-scoured tablelands to the Atlantic. The highest summit is Monte San Valentin, at 4,058 meters. Where Patagonia ends is a matter of habit rather than law, though the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego mark its southern edge, and guanacos, condors and fjords are shared by both countries.
Tehuelche and Selknam peoples hunted these plains for millennia before the Argentine and Chilean states pushed south in the nineteenth century and remade them as sheep country. Welsh settlers built chapels in the Chubut valley; Croatian and Scottish shepherds ran flocks of astonishing size. Wool built the fortunes of Punta Arenas, oil and gas now underwrite much of the Argentine side, and tourism drawn to Torres del Paine and Los Glaciares is the growth industry. Patagonia has also become a laboratory for large-scale conservation, with private philanthropy converting former estancias into national parks. Its glaciers, meanwhile, are among the fastest-thinning on the planet, and their meltwater is a measurable contributor to global sea-level rise.