Surely, when you hear about Puerto Montt, Chiloé, or the Osorno volcano, you can roughly place them on the elongated map of Chile. They are in the region of Los Lagos, south of the country, but not as far south as Torres del Paine or the Drake Passage. A destination ideal for adventure tourism that hides natural treasures just as impressive as the southern ones, but less known to European travelers. This is the case of the Puelo River glacier valley, which begins in Argentina and flows into the Reloncaví estuary.
Chilean Playground
A playground of sorts is this part of the Northern Chilean Patagonia for engineer Martín Gildemeister, owner of Tawa, Puelo Refuge. It was his love for the mountains—he has already scaled two eight-thousanders—that led him, together with his wife, Camila Vial, to create this remote hotel awarded two years ago at the World Architecture Festival (WAF). An award that highlighted the ability of the architect Antonia Pellegrini, in charge of the project, to harmoniously integrate into the surroundings the lodge’s geometric massing, as well as the two modules that host the eight rooms open to the landscape, each named after a native tree.
“Just listen to the passion with which the Chilean speaks about the strategic location of this Nordic-inspired property, on the shores of Lake Tagua Tagua, to understand why it is so special: it is protected to the north by the national parks Vicente Pérez Rosales and Alerce Andino, flanked to the south by the majestic Pumalín Douglas Tompkins and bordering the new and expansive conservation initiative Puchegüín.”
“The Tagua Tagua Park, which is nearby, is a private-protected area of an evergreen forest like the one we are in, but when we start to climb we already see another kind of landscape, drier, more mountainous,” explains Martín, who also boasts about his most famous neighbors, the puma and the pudú, one of the smallest deer in the world.
