Patagonia: Trip of a Lifetime

In our latest instalment of the world's greatest journeys, Chris Moss offers an inspiring, practical guide to visiting the life-changing wilderness of Patagonia.

9:46AM BST 18 Oct 2012

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Vast and empty, wind-swept and barren, Patagonia is an archetypal landscape of the imagination. Where the pampas run out around the Rio Negro, the land becomes unfriendly to human settlement, and if you drive down the great highways Argentina s Ruta 3 and Ruta 40 or Chile s Carretera Austral you ll see mainly sheep, flightless rhea and llama-like guanacos. Eventually you come to the Andes, where ice-fields break through to form glaciers on the lakesides, or to the lonely island of Tierra del Fuego.

Patagonia enlightened the young, inquisitive Charles Darwin and inspired aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It imbued ornithologist WH Hudson with a mystical sense of nature. Forty years ago, Bruce Chatwin visited and his In Patagonia reinvigorated British travel writing. It continues to beguile intrepid travellers, and in the past two decades smart hotels have opened across the region to provide comfort and luxury, and the dining options have improved immeasurably.

This triangle at the southern end of South America is immense about 400,000 square miles with three quarters of that in Argentina . and then there s the island of Tierra del Fuego at the very bottom. The name of Patagonia comes down to us from patagones , the name given to the tall native Tehuelche people by Ferdinand Magellan in the early 16th century. It might mean big feet , but is probably an allusion to a dog-headed monster in the Spanish romance Primaleón. Either way, it was a magical-sounding name for a faraway land.

It was fitting. For Patagonia lends itself to flights of fancy. It is home surprisingly, perhaps to the world s seventh-largest desert, a mainly flat swathe of steppe and tableland that occupies most of Argentine Patagonia and juts into Chile s Aisén and Magallanes provinces. Also in the latter are two great icefields, remnants of the last ice age, which spill out of the Andes as impressive glaciers. The wildest winds in South America blow across eastern Patagonia, while the west has some of the most beautiful temperate rainforests on the planet.

The peaks of in Torres del Paine