It’s more than two months since we were in the southern Chilean region of Patagonia. We miss Patagonia so much our hearts just flutter every time we browse through the pics we took while there!

On 31 March 2008, we arrived in Puerto Natales, a town in the Chilean Patagonia (located nearly 250 km to the north of Punta Arenas) after taking a 3-hour bus ride from Punta Arenas. Puerto Natales is the “capital” of both the commune of the same name and the Última Esperanza Province of Magallanes and Antártica Chilena Region. We put in the quotation marks because it’s more like a very remote small town, quite bare of touristic shops.

When we were there, it was almost the start of the winter season, and so there were very few travelers there. The place was so peaceful and skies so cloudy that we couldn’t help reminding ourselves over and over again we were “at the end of the world”. There is only one “real” hotel in Puerto Natales; the other type of accommodation are basically family-run guesthouses or inns. There are 2 small supermarkets, and one was already closing and getting rid of its goods before winter.

We hope Puerto Natales stays this way - real, authentic and unhyped - for the sake of preserving its laid-back atmosphere and incredible scenery.

First day in Puerto Natales

 

Most shops were closed for the afternoon

 

Cute dustbin!

 

Grace with a mural of local painting behind

Church

We’re still not sure whether these trees were artificially shaped to look so rounded, or whether they grow into this shape naturally without help. We saw so many of these rounded trees (even in Punta Arenas) that we think perhaps it’s all natural.

 

Pedro with an old locomotive from the early 1900s

 

The inside of one of these round trees. After seeing this, we thought the trees might be naturally rounded.

 

Looks like something from a movie set

 

One of the hundreds of stray dogs in Puerto Natales. We’ve never seen so many stray dogs as we saw in Chile!

 

One of the buildings along the road. The place felt so much like Scandinavia.

Very yummy beef stew!

Fish and chips a la Patagonian

The most beautiful part of Puerto Natales is the sea and the Última Esperanza Sound. We’ll show you that in the next post!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 11:56 am and is filed under Chile, Patagonia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.