Gateway to Patagonia — Torres del Paine, the milodón cave, and end-of-world seafood
Puerto Natales is a small port town on the Señoret Channel at the edge of the Patagonian steppe — the essential base for Torres del Paine National Park (Chile's most visited national park and consistently ranked among the world's top 10 natural wonders). The Los Torres peaks (three granite towers rising 2,850m from the valley floor) are the signature image; the W and O trekking circuits draw tens of thousands of hikers annually. In town: the Cueva del Milodón (a cave where a near-complete milodón ground sloth skeleton was found in 1896, inspiring Bruce Chatwin's 'In Patagonia'), the narrow-ga…
Puerto Natales was founded as a refrigeration and shipping centre for the Patagonian sheep-ranching industry in 1911 — the estancias (sheep farms) of Última Esperanza province made Patagonia a significant global wool producer in the early 20th century. The region was one of the last parts of South America to be settled by Europeans (in the 1890s) and still has one of the lowest population densities on Earth. The discovery of the milodón cave in 1896 and Bruce Chatwin's 1977 book 'In Patagonia' put Puerto Natales on the global literary and traveller map before the trekking boom of the 1990s.