Chile
Parque Nacional Alerce Andino
Three-thousand-year-old alerce trees rise from moss-draped Valdivian rainforest — South America's answer to sequoias.
The forest floor is permanently wet. Moss covers every surface — trunk, root, rock, fallen branch — in a green so saturated it seems to glow. Above it all, the alerces rise like columns in a flooded cathedral, their bark fissured by millennia of rain. These trees were saplings when Tutankhamun was being buried.
Parque Nacional Alerce Andino protects the southernmost alerce stands in Chile, located in the Los Lagos Region near Puerto Montt. The alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) grows just 1 centimetre in diameter per century; individual trees here have been carbon-dated at over 3,000 years old. The park receives more than 4,000 millimetres of annual rainfall, keeping the Valdivian temperate rainforest floor permanently saturated and feeding mosses that grow in the canopy as well as on every surface below. Forty glacially formed lakes are scattered through the park, some with visibility extending 10 metres to the bottom. The species regenerates only in extremely wet conditions, making this one of the few places on Earth where it still thrives.
Solo
Walking among trees older than most civilisations resets your sense of scale. The trails are quiet, the canopy muffles everything, and the only company is birdsong and the drip of rainforest condensation.
Couple
The alerces create an atmosphere that demands slowness — walking through this forest is not hiking, it's absorbing. Pack lunch, find a glacial lake with ten-metre visibility, and sit beneath a tree that predates the Roman Empire.
- The park protects the southernmost alerce stands in Chile — the species regenerates only in extremely wet conditions and grows just 1cm in diameter per century.
- Individual trees here are carbon-dated at over 3,000 years — seedlings when the Phoenicians were building their first boats in the Mediterranean.
- The park's 40 glacially-formed lakes are so clear that visibility extends 10 metres to the bottom in the shallower ones.
- Annual rainfall exceeds 4,000mm — the forest floor is permanently saturated and mosses grow in the canopy as well as on every surface below.
Packed lunch eaten beneath trees that were saplings when Tutankhamun was buried.
Puerto Montt's angelmó fish market — caldillo de congrio (conger eel soup) from a counter stool.
Milcao and chapalele — Chiloé-style potato dumplings served at nearby roadside restaurants.
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