As you fly from Santiago to Chile’s southernmost tip, the continent seems to disintegrate beneath you.
After the monumental mountains of Torres del Paine National Park, with its sapphire rivers, white glaciers and turquoise lakes, the land around the coast cascades into the Pacific in bits and pieces. This is where the world ends, you think. This is Patagonia.
I’d come to kick off a two-week trip exploring Chile’s wild side — its most otherworldly landscapes and primordial panoramas — staying at the three high-design lodges owned by Tierra Hotels. One of the hospitality brands most responsible for the country’s recent rise as a luxe-adventure destination, Tierra recently opened in the untouristed, Jurassic-feeling Chiloé archipelago, adding a hotel in the country’s midsection to its equally remote and sustainability-minded stays in the south’s Patagonia and north’s Atacama Desert.
Tierra now covers Chile’s wildest wilds, which stretch 2,600 miles along the Pacific Rim’s unpredictable Ring of Fire, squeezed between the temperamental ocean and the towering Andes, among the world’s youngest and most volatile mountains. The country has protected some 20 percent of this territory — which includes hundreds of volcanoes, lakes, rivers and the only temperate rain forest in South America — as nature reserves.
I began at Tierra Patagonia, a four-hour drive from the closest commercial airport. Clad in strips of local Lenga wood, the 40-room, three-year-old hotel’s sinuous, low-rise form all but disappears into the cratered moonscape of dusty, scrub-covered hills. Every window frames views of adjacent Lake Sarmiento and massive mountains — where I’d soon make my way with Tierra’s expert-led excursions by foot, horseback, boat and car.
In my first days, I start slow, with gentle walks to take in the fluorescent yellow-greens and electric blues of the strange terrain, communing with llama-like guanacos and ostrich-related rheas, staring up at glacier-carved, razor-sharp rock formations rising in the background.
And then it’s on to the rigorous 11-mile round-trip trek to the base of the Torres del Paine, the park’s namesake trio of 7,000-plus-foot, finger-shaped granite spires. Scrambling over rickety bridges across rushing rapids, my group hiked along curving paths through green gullies of dense foliage. Towards the top, the trees disappeared, and views of cerulean skies, rocky cliffs and, finally, the sculptural peaks of the Torres opened up.
At the foot of the towers, after a body-taxing 45-minute, 45-degree ascent, we dipped our toes in the freezing, turquoise waters of a lake fed by the melting glacier above, craning our necks to see condors circle. We broke out lunches from our backpacks and picnicked in satisfied silence.
A few days later, I found myself on Tierra Chiloé’s traditional-but-tricked-out wooden fishing boat, cruising through the archipelago’s narrow channels. Together with a few guests from the 12-room hotel, we spotted sea lions and penguins while Tierra’s staff served local oysters and salmon. Dolphins shimmied up beside the ship, jumping out of the inky water to show off. Some of us slipped into sea kayaks while others hiked the low, forested hills — the landscape looking like lost-in-time versions of coastal Maine, Oregon or Northern California, dotted by small family farms and fishing villages whose brightly colored houses sat above the water on stilts.
That evening, in Tierra’s waterfront, glass-enclosed, Shaker-accented living room — whose views extend to the Andes some 50 miles away — we reviewed the day while sipping Pisco Sours flavored with Chilean rhubarb. We talked of our other Chiloé adventures, too: visiting local markets, tasting seafood empanadas, touring vibrantly painted, UNESCO-protected churches and clamoring over cliffs on the rugged Pacific coast to peer at waves crashing below.
I didn’t have much time to reminisce, however, because I left the next day for my final stop, the Atacama Desert, a land as arid and barren as Chiloé was humid and lush — and just as extreme as Patagonia. Staying at the original Tierra — a gardened, 32-room oasis with a modern, adobe-and-glass design that called to mind Palm Springs — I ventured out into a land whose rusty red mountains and cracked earth looked like Mars.
After days spent mountain biking through flash-flood-carved canyons and bathing in sulfurous hot springs, I awoke before dawn on my last morning for the hour-long drive to one of the Atacama’s, if not Chile’s, most unique sites: the Tatio Geysers, named for the active volcano at whose base they sit. There, at an oxygen-depleted altitude of 14,000-plus feet, I hiked amid plumes of steam rising nearly five stories and 40 geysers that erupted with boiling water every few minutes. Flamingos flew overhead and vicuñas — another llama cousin — grazed on Dr. Seussian tufts of grass.
Pausing between the columns of steam and hot water, I could sense the ground vibrating beneath my feet, only a thin layer of earth separating me from the cauldron of primordial magma roiling below. I felt on the edge of something here — perhaps not the end of the world, but more like the cusp of geological time. Or maybe just the edge of danger. Either way, I liked it. (Tierra’s all-inclusive rates from $775).