Parque Nacional Bernardo O'Higgins

The boat pushes into the fjord and the phone signal dies within the hour. Glacial ice drifts past the hull in chunks the colour of old glass, and the mountainsides close in — steep, dripping, trailless. Bernardo O'Higgins is a park measured in the millions of hectares that has chosen to remain entirely without paths.

Parque Nacional Bernardo O'Higgins is Chile's largest national park at 3.5 million hectares — larger than Belgium — and contains no permanent infrastructure, no maintained trails, and no land-based services. Access is exclusively by boat from Puerto Natales, a full day's journey through fjords with no cellular coverage. The glacier system draining into these waters includes the O'Higgins Glacier, whose calved icebergs float alongside the boat throughout the journey. No hiking trails exist inside the park; all visits are water-based, and the only human presence is the vessel you arrive on. The Kawésqar indigenous people navigated these channels for thousands of years before European contact, and their dried-mussel preservation technique — cholga seca — persists in the region's cooking.