Patagonia: the Ends of the Earth

Patagonia is one of the most evocative names in the lexicon of world geography — a word that conjures images of savage winds, towering granite spires, gleaming glaciers calving into turquoise lakes, and a vast, largely uninhabited landscape stretching toward the very bottom of the inhabited world. Encompassing the southern cone of South America below roughly the 40th parallel south, Patagonia is not a single nation or province but rather a geographic and cultural region shared between Argentina and Chile, bounded by the Andes Mountains to the west, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the arid steppes of northern Patagonia to the north, and the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego to the south. Covering some 800,000 to 1,000,000 square kilometers depending on how the boundaries are drawn, it is one of the least densely populated regions on Earth, home to fewer than two million people scattered across an area twice the size of France.

The region's appeal is paradoxical: its very harshness is what makes it beautiful. The relentless westerly winds known as los cuarenta rugientes — the Roaring Forties — strip the Andean slopes clean of vegetation and drive the weather systems that shape the land. The Andes themselves, acting as a giant barrier to moisture-laden Pacific air, cast a rain shadow over the Argentine steppe to the east, creating a cold, semi-arid desert where sparse grasses and low shrubs sustain guanacos, rheas, and the pumas that hunt them. To the west, in Chilean Patagonia, the same mountains trap the moisture, producing temperate rainforests, fjords, channels, and archipelagos of extraordinary complexity where rainfall can exceed 4,000 millimeters per year. Between these extremes lies a landscape of almost incomprehensible scale and variety.

For centuries Patagonia was known to Europeans primarily as a place of myth — a land where giants walked and monsters lurked in the cold southern seas. Ferdinand Magellan first gave the region its name in 1520, and for the next three hundred years it remained one of the most feared and least understood corners of the globe. Only in the nineteenth century, with the voyages of Charles Darwin and others, did naturalists begin to appreciate the extraordinary biological and geological richness of this remote land. In the twentieth century Patagonia became a destination for adventurers, scientists, and eventually tourists seeking the kind of raw, unmediated wilderness that has almost entirely vanished from the developed world. In the twenty-first century it stands at a crossroads: a place of sublime natural beauty and ecological significance that is simultaneously threatened by climate change, overgrazing, introduced species, and the pressures of an increasingly popular tourism industry.

To understand Patagonia is to understand the deep history of the Earth itself — the breakup of Gondwana that created the landmass, the volcanic eruptions that built the Andes, the successive ice ages that sculpted the landscape into its present form, and the long human presence that shaped its cultures across ten thousand years before the first European ship appeared on the horizon. This article tells the full story of Patagonia: its geology, its indigenous peoples, its exploration, its colonization, its extraordinary wildlife, its national parks and conservation challenges, and its complex future in a warming world.

Patagonia Defined: Geography and Boundaries

The name Patagonia is applied to a large, imprecisely defined region at the southern tip of South America. Different authorities draw its boundaries in different ways, but the most widely accepted definition encompasses all of mainland South America south of approximately the 40th parallel south, together with the island of Tierra del Fuego. On this reckoning, Patagonia covers roughly 800,000 to 1,000,000 square kilometers, straddling the border between Argentina and Chile from the Colorado River in the north to the Strait of Magellan in the south.

The Argentine province of Patagonia, a concept used in administrative and economic contexts, includes the provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz, and Tierra del Fuego. These five provinces together cover about 780,000 square kilometers, representing approximately 28 percent of Argentina's national territory but containing only about four percent of its population. Chilean Patagonia, less clearly defined, encompasses the regions of Aisén del General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo and Magallanes y de la Antártica Chilena, covering roughly 240,000 square kilometers of mainland territory plus extensive island groups.