Where the Carretera Austral nearly ends — a turquoise glacial lake, pumas on the steppe, and a frontier town at the edge of Patagonian wilderness
Cochrane is one of the last functioning towns on the Carretera Austral before the road ends entirely near the Argentine border, in the Aysén Region of Chilean Patagonia. The town serves as the base for exploring Cochrane Lake (Lago Cochrane / Pueyrredón in Argentina) — a lake of extraordinary turquoise colour fed by Cochrane Glacier — and for the Reserva Nacional Lago Cochrane, a high-steppe landscape where pumas hunt guanacos with unusual frequency relative to more visited Patagonian parks. Jeinimeni National Reserve, 50km north, adds caves, pink flamingo lagoons, and pre-Columbian cave pain…
Cochrane was formally established as a township only in 1954, one of the last places in Chile to be officially settled — the region was accessible only by boat or horse for most of its history, and the first colonists arrived in the 1920s to farm the river valleys. The construction of the Carretera Austral (begun under Pinochet in 1976, reaching Cochrane in the early 1990s) connected the town to the rest of Chile by road for the first time. The town is named after Thomas Cochrane, the Scottish-born naval commander who led the Chilean navy to independence in 1820 and is considered one of the f…