How one U.S. conservationist's work is helping to preserve Chile's wilderness

BRUNSWICK PENINSULA, Chile — The rugged shores and icy forests at the tip of the Brunswick Peninsula in southern Chile are soon to be the cornerstone in a long route of national parks and mountain ranges that extends down through Patagonia.

In March this year, 315,000 acres around Cape Froward, the southernmost point of the South American continent, will become Chile's 47th national park.

The initiative is in large part thanks to the efforts of U.S. conservationist and philanthropist Kristine Tompkins, and will become the latest step in her mission to protect one of the last truly wild places on Earth.

"When you come to places like this, you start to feel very small, and you realize how we're just a tiny part of all life on our planet," Tompkins says in a sheltered hollow below the towering Cross of the Seas.

The giant metal cross was erected at the southernmost point on the continent in 1987 to mark the visit of Pope John Paul II to Chile. The howling wind sings as it whips through the creaking structure.

The hike up to the cross is difficult and swampy, with Tompkins and her team stepping between tufts of grass, while the glassy water along the shoreline laps quietly at the stony beach below.

"We've had a lot of success as a species, but we have done a hell of a lot of damage too and the pace is picking up," Tompkins says.

"The more we understand about who and where we are on this Earth, and what our role is, the better shot all life has of being in one piece in 100 or 200 years' time."

Protecting places like Cape Froward are key to her vision.

Nearly 20% of the area is peatland, which absorbs carbon and filters groundwater. Pristine native forests reach right down to the shores, where green frills on the surface are the only hint of the sprawling kelp forests beneath the tides.

In the distance across the Strait of Magellan, the glaciers that cap the Darwin Range glint in the afternoon sun.

Kristine Tompkins came to Chile for the first time in early 1993 with her husband Douglas Tompkins, who co-founded the North Face and Esprit clothing companies. He died in a kayaking accident in 2015.

Through Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina, as well as their parent organization Tompkins Conservation, they have helped create 15 national parks, including two marine parks between the two countries — protecting 14.8 million acres of land and 30 million acres of ocean.

And Kristine Tompkins herself has the remarkable ability to make those around her feel like they have been walking alongside throughout her journey. Her curiosity is boundless, be it kneeling to peer through portholes streaked with water as the boat out to the peninsula sways through the waves, or searching for heart-shaped rocks on the beach for her collection.

Cape Froward will be the 16th national park Tompkins Conservation has helped create.

"We started off by acquiring land as and when it came onto the market," says Marcela Quiroz, Rewilding Chile's director of strategic partnerships, in the dappled shade of a coihue forest.

"The first major purchase we made was nearly 94,000 hectares in 2021 which we bought from a local family," she says, which is about 363 square miles or more than 232,000 acres. "We want to keep working to complete this puzzle."

A local landowning family was looking to sell part of their estate, and even posted the property listing in The New York Times. But when Tompkins Conservation called, they lowered their price, enthused by the idea that the area would be protected.

Two months later, the organization bought up a second piece of land, this time 84,000 acres, and then in March 2024, the Chilean government signed an agreement to create the park and annex two chunks of state-owned land at each end.

"For us, national parks are a large-scale conservation strategy," explains Quiroz. "But this does not mean that we are freezing the local economy, the idea is to be able to develop alternative economic activities in harmony with biodiversity."

Chile's national forestry commission, which will eventually take over the management of the park, is completing its administrative processes. An Indigenous consultation will follow, before the park opens later this year.

"This whole corridor makes up 8 million hectares of protected land," Quiroz says proudly — almost 20 million acres.

Beyond their work creating parks and conservation areas, Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina have reintroduced species that have been driven to local or national extinction, including jaguars, red-and-green macaws, giant river otters and Darwin's rheas.

There is even a population of the critically endangered huemul deer at Cape Froward, although little is known about it. A network of camera traps and sound recording devices has been set up to assess their soundscape and movement.

"In 100 years I think we're going to look back and be proud of what Douglas and Kristine have done, and they will be big characters in Chilean history," says Carolina Morgado, executive director of Rewilding Chile. "I feel proud that they have chosen Chile to focus their conservation efforts."

National parks are the highest level of conservation status in Chile. The country's first park was created in 1926, and today the national forestry commission oversees 109 protected areas.

Every president since 1926 has created at least one national park, and Cape Froward will be President Gabriel Boric's chance to protect a swath of his home region, Magallanes.

Evidence of the long human history of this windswept coastline of Cape Froward, and there are occasionally scars on the oldest trees where the Kawésqar people stripped away the bark to line their canoes. At Bahía del Águila are the remains of a 19th-century whaling station.

And in the next bay is one of eight lighthouses built along this coastline by Scottish architect George Slight to guide ships through the perilous Strait of Magellan. It will be turned into a museum and visitor center to form the entry point to the new national park.

For now, the skeleton of a female humpback whale is laid out on the floor of the lighthouse, and three canoes are propped up in one wing of the old building.

Tompkins says she is proud to be handing over to the next generation of conservationists.

"It feels like a tremendous responsibility," says Morgado. "This goes way beyond creating national parks. It's about installing a vision about how we, as citizens, can get involved in protecting the land and its biodiversity.

"And that, to me at least, is important."