The wild land Darwin couldn’t get off his mind

Patagonia stole the great naturalist’s heart and its stark beauty is worth saving. Stanley Stewart visits a rewilding project that is doing just that

Towards the end of his life, Charles Darwin was asked which place he most vividly remembered. His voyage on HMS Beagle had taken him round the world. He had visited New Zealand and Australia, the Galapagos and Tahiti. So his reply seemed to surprise even himself. Patagonia, he answered. Then he added that he could barely understand why these “arid wastes” had taken such a firm hold on his memory. He reflected that perhaps it was because the landscapes gave such free scope to the imagination.

Darwin was not alone. Patagonia has offered free scope to the imaginations of countless romantics and adventurers. It is as much an idea as a place – a boundless pristine land where dreamers escape to. Yet it is not as pristine as we might hope. The fragile ecosystem of the steppeland has been depleted by a century of ranching. The sea off these coasts is threatened by destructive bottom trawling on an industrial scale, while its islands, home to huge colonies of birds, seals and penguins, have seen the invasion of alien species.

I had come to the Atlantic coast of Patagonia to visit a remarkable group of young people who are doing something about it, step by patient step. One of the many imaginations fired by Patagonia was that of Douglas Tompkins, founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing companies. As he approached his half century, he abandoned retail clothing for a new life in Patagonia, determined to make a contribution to its preservation. He began buying enormous tracts of wilderness in both Chile and Argentina (see panel, below) with the idea that he would eventually hand the lands over to the respective governments with a commitment to create parks. The first of these bequests took shape in 2019, as Tompkins Conservation gifted a million acres to the Chilean government to help form Pumalin Park. Sadly, Douglas did not live to see the fulfilment of his dream. In 2015 he died in a kayaking accident on Lago General Carrera in his beloved Patagonia.

But Tompkins’s crusading shadow in these regions is long and his legacy, through Tompkins Conservation, lives on, supporting a range of projects throughout Patagonia. Among them is Rewilding Argentina, which operates in five territories from the wetlands of Iberá in the north to the peatlands of the Mitre Peninsula in the far south. Its latest project is Patagonia Azul, or Blue Patagonia, working to protect a huge swathe of coastline. These are the kind of landscapes that stole Darwin’s heart.

I had come up the coast from Comodoro Rivadaria through the convoluted desert of Rocas Coloradas. Bleak, spectacular, skeletal, it looked like the beginning of the world, or possibly its end. Carved by water and winds over millennia into bizarre shapes, the hills and ridges are a rainbow of mineral colours – greens and yellows, silver, russet, pale ash, obsidian black. Sea fossils appeared in the crumbling rock. When we walked into an amphitheatre of eroded hills, we found petrified trees, the bones of ancient forests, a hundred million years old, protruding from the desert.

Three hours up the coast is Bahia Bustamante, once an outback settlement where seaweed was harvested for export. When the trade came to an end in the 1990s, the place was abandoned until the grandson of the owner transformed it into a wildlife destination. The workmen’s bungalows have been converted into retro guesthouses. From the front windows, you gaze across an empty beach at the South Atlantic. At the back, the vast Patagonian steppe carries winds from the Andes.

As I walked back to my bungalow after dinner, a party of rheas – South American cousins of the ostrich – flounced past, feathers swaying like ball gowns. Bahia Bustamante has been dubbed Argentina’s private Galapagos. Elegant guanacos, a wild relative of the llama, canter across the wiry coirón grasslands. Patagonian maras, rabbitlike rodents the size of spaniels, scurry among the scrub.

Boat trips take visitors to see huge colonies of Magellanic penguins and sea lions on outlying islands, while a host of spectacular seabirds nest here, including grebes, shearwaters, steamerducks, flamingos, Antarctic terns, sandpipers, three kinds of oystercatcher and four kinds of cormorant.

But my favourite wildlife was further down the food chain. At low tide I went with a guide to explore the rock pools on the empty peninsula of La Guanera. We peered down through the water as if through windows at secret miniature

worlds teeming with life – sea lettuce, limpets, tiny black mussels, anemones, soft corals and yellow barnacles. Dipping our hands into the cold water, we lifted rocks to find constellations of tiny starfish while dainty crabs scuttled for cover.

From Bahia Bustamante, I headed north along Ruta 1, Patagonia’s Blue Route. A gravel track shadowing this wild coast, it is one of the great roads of South America, which seems busy if there is one car an hour. On my left, Patagonian steppe tipped away into vast provinces of sky. On my right, the Atlantic heaved and pushed into rocky inlets and empty bays. Patagonia felt like a vast vacant lot at the end of the world, a place unfinished, stripped of fussy detail – as if God had left it to last and then run out of time.

The sense of space was mesmerising. Feeble fences enclosed ranches the size of counties. Here and there rickety gates with faded hand-painted signboards announced habitation, though the actual habitation – rustic homesteads – were usually too distant from the road to be seen. Sometimes I glimpsed a horseman crossing a line of hills, silhouetted against clouds, followed by his dog, as a wave of sheep drifted beneath them across the yellow grass. Towards the day’s end I arrived at El Sauce, an estancia of almost 50,000 acres, which serves as the headquarters of Patagonia Azul. There, I stepped into a quiet revolution.

Launched in 2019, Patagonia Azul lies within the Unesco Patagonia Azul Biosphere Reserve, an area of 12,000 square miles along the Atlantic coast. Two ocean currents meet here – a warm Brazilian current and a cold, nutrientrich southern current – producing a remarkable biodiversity of marine birds, mammals, fish and invertebrates. El Sauce is the nucleus of the rewilding project here, which is destined to become a protected parkland with trails and visitor facilities. From this base, Rewilding Argentina’s staff – all young Argentines – have begun monitoring the flora and fauna of the coast, developing conservation projects and reaching out to the local community.

Community involvement holds the key. Rewilding is not just about restoring wildlife, it is also a tool to make local economies more sustainable. The team at El Sauce is hoping to create a different mindset among locals, shifting gradually from an extractive to a restorative approach to the environment, in order to ensure their own future.

In Camarones, the local town of less than 2,000 people, they have persuaded politicians to set up an environmental committee to address recycling, waste management, renewable energy, local food production, single-use plastic and sustainable land use. To connect the residents more closely with their own ocean, they have supported a Friends of the Ocean group, which organises clean-ups along the coast.

They have founded an Ocean Club for school children to teach them to swim, kayak, snorkel and paddleboard, helping them to appreciate the ocean and marine life. Working with local volunteers, they have created a nursery garden, now flourishing in polytunnels, so the town’s fruit and vegetables are no longer trucked from 200 miles away. To meet Mari, who used to work in a fish-processing plant, brimming with enthusiasm among her rows of courgettes and tomatoes, squash and strawberries, was heartwarming.

Meanwhile at Estancia El Sauce, the team has removed 12 miles of fences and 6,000 sheep from the property, opening some 17,000 acres to the free movement of wildlife. They have attached a tracking collar to a resident puma – seen by ranchers as a threat to livestock – in order to understand its hunting activity. On uninhabited islands, home to colonies of sea lions, penguins and nesting birds, they plan to remove invasive species that threaten the natural habitat. At sea, they are hoping to reseed depleted algae meadows, which are central to the marine environment.

Tourism has a part to play. Income from visitors gives nature an economic value. A new campsite has been created at El Sauce. Hiking trails are being opened, a glamping company has identified sites along the shore, and a dive centre will start operation next year. In Camarones, new enterprises offer mountain-bike excursions and sea kayaking while boat tour operators take visitors to the astonishing wildlife of the outlying islands. There is a sense in sleepy, remote Camarones that, step by step, their world is changing.

My own days in Patagonia Azul were punctuated by wildlife excursions. On Isla Leones, colonies of elephant seals – huge brutish males, scarred from battles – bellowed at harems of females while curious juveniles crowded round our boat, frolicking and spinning, popping up their heads to get a good look at us.

A pod of black and white hourglass dolphins shadowed the boat on our way to Islas Blancas where thousands of cormorants, gulls, skuas and terns opened their wings and cried into the wind, while sea lions watched us suspiciously. In Cabo dos Bahias, penguins waddled back and forth like old-fashioned bankers in tails, plump and unassuming, pausing to gaze out to sea as if lost in thought.

At El Sauce, I picnicked in the lee of boulders, sheltering from the wind. I walked between headlands framing deep coves. I loitered on beaches carpeted with lavender shells. I swam in an icy Atlantic. Elegant giant petrels – the condors of the sea – sailed along the shoreline. The distances seemed fathomless, the landscape timeless. Standing on the coast at El Sauce, there was no sign of human life, no boats, no distant figures, no roads, no houses… just this wild coast and its thundering ocean.

Darwin was right about Patagonia. It does fire the imagination. And at El Sauce, the heirs to Douglas Tompkins are imagining a whole new world where care for the environment is central to human activity.

It felt like a vast lot at the end of the world, a place unfinished, as if God had run out of time