Could this wild rainforest be Patagonia's best-kept secret?

I’ve never been a lover of hiking in the rain. But standing in Chile’s Queulat National Park, soaked to the skin and ankle-deep in mud, I find myself mesmerised by it. Mist drifts between giant beech and cinnamon trees, water droplets cling to moss-covered bark like scattered diamonds, and on the forest floor, caterpillars shelter beneath nalca (Chilean rhubarb) plants with leaves the size of elephants’ ears.

This is Patagonia, but not as I’d expected it. The vast landscape spanning southern Chile and Argentina is better known for its dry steppe and stark granite peaks. Yet in Chile’s Aysén region, where rain falls most of the year, the Valdivian temperate rainforest blankets most of the area, earning it the nickname Patagonia Verde.

“I find it strange when it’s sunny,” my driver Juan had said earlier that morning on the drive into the park. As we bumped along a gravel road, waterfalls spilled down the forested hillsides and across our path. “The rain is normal for us. Without it, Patagonia wouldn’t be like this.” He glanced towards the snow-capped peaks and added: “Para nosotros, estos paisajes son vida (‘for us, these landscapes are life’).”

Northern Patagonia is undeniably beautiful, but it’s not easy to get here. Cut off from the rest of Chile by a maze of waterways, steep mountains and the vast Northern Patagonian Ice Field, Aysén remained isolated for centuries. Even today, despite the arrival of the Carretera Austral, the region’s main highway, it still takes around five hours to reach Queulat National Park from the nearest airport in Balmaceda.

“There’s no easy way in,” says guide Federico Hernandez, who I meet later on a boat trip to the San Rafael Glacier, one of dozens of glaciers fed by the Northern Patagonian Ice Field. “That’s why this part of Patagonia still feels so wild. Sometimes I look out from the boat deck and there’s just nothing and no one for hours. It’s beautiful.”

At the trailhead, the forest seems ready to swallow me whole. Plants reach for my boots, and moss and lichen droop from the trees in thick green curtains. Water has already begun to seep through my coat. Before I disappear beneath the canopy, Juan offers a final piece of advice: “Listen to the forest,” he says. “The rain, the birds. That’s how you connect with nature here.” Then, with a grin, he nods towards the trees. “And keep an eye out for the pumas.”

I enter the forest, where the air is cooler and the smell of damp earth more intense. Even the rain sounds different here: it no longer pounds on gravel, but seeps and trickles softly through the canopy and ferns. A chucao tapaculo — a robin-like bird native to these forests — hops through the undergrowth near my feet, pausing to watch as I squelch through the mud, before letting out a loud, cackling call.

As the trail steepens, I take Juan’s advice to use my ears as well as my eyes: rain patters on leaves overhead, a red-headed woodpecker taps somewhere high in the canopy and water rushes beyond the trees. Eventually, I emerge onto a wooden suspension bridge swaying above a thrashing glacial river. It wobbles beneath my feet, the wind whipping at my face and shaking the trees around me. Below, whitewater crashes over giant boulders, its roar echoing in my ears.

“‘Queulat’ means ‘sound of waterfalls’ in the language of the Indigenous Chono people,” Juan had told me. The Chono, one of several Indigenous groups in Chilean Patagonia, were seafaring hunter-gatherers who navigated Aysén’s fjords and rivers by canoe for more than 1,000 years before colonists settled here in the early 1900s. Today, the Chono are widely considered culturally extinct, their legacy preserved in place names such as Queulat and shell middens scattered along the water’s edge.

At last, there’s a gap in the canopy as I reach the trail’s viewpoint. I thought the weather would deny me the park’s most famous sight, but the clouds have lifted just enough to see it: the Ventisquero Colgante, or Hanging Glacier. A ribbon of ice-blue clings improbably between two slate-grey peaks before plunging over the cliff edge in a series of waterfalls that crash into a milky green lake below. Framed by dense rainforest, it seems too beautiful to be real — a glacier hidden inside a jungle.

Into the fjords

Still sodden from the hike, I continue my journey north along the Carretera Austral. Built in the 1970s, the 770-mile road links communities that, up until then, relied on horses and boats to get around. On the drive, I pass towns where wood smoke rises from tin-roofed cabins with hand-painted signs advertising pancitos (bread rolls). I stop for one, eating it with homemade jam made from calafate berries, which are native to Patagonia. Outside, saddles and stirrups hang from metal fencing and the air smells of damp leather and earth.

I get back into the car to continue the journey and within minutes the road is swallowed once more by rainforest, with little sign of human life beyond the occasional beat-up truck or a gaucho on horseback driving cattle. Then, through a gap in the trees, I catch my first glimpse of the steel-grey waters of Puyuhuapi Fjord: a deep glacial channel where rainforest-covered mountains meet Pacific waters, and where I plan to spend the next two nights.

Waiting at the water’s edge is a small white boat, bobbing gently beside a jetty hidden among the foliage. “The journey won’t be smooth,” says our captain. “But don’t worry, it’s worth it.”

Within minutes, rain is hammering on the windows and waves are crashing against the hull. Unable to sit on deck, I retreat to the belly of the boat, where a handful of passengers hunch silently in waterproofs. I strain my neck to peer through a tiny porthole, but our breath has fogged the glass. Beyond the waves and a Chilean flag whipping wildly in the wind, I can make out almost nothing.

By the time we reach Puyuhuapi Lodge, the light has almost gone. Sheltered by dense forest, everything is eerily quiet and the water is as still as glass. A lone streetlamp glows through the fog at the end of the jetty and firelight flickers through a window. When I reach my room, a hummingbird is feeding on a blooming chilco plant covered in electric pink and purple flowers that hang like pendant earrings.

Wild encounters

“There’s magia [‘magic’] here,” says my guide Dani Varga as we set out on a wildlife cruise of Puyuhuapi Fjord the following morning. The sun’s out, but she’s head-to-toe in waterproofs, including a pair of mud-splattered white wellies.

Overnight, the fog has lifted. Mountains I hadn’t known were there rise directly from the water, their upper slopes dusted with snow. The fjord has gone from grey to emerald, absorbing the forest that surrounds it. A cormorant skims low across the surface, leaving a trail in its wake. Then, a dark shape breaks the water just a few metres from us. “Dolphins,” says Dani.

A pod of Chilean dolphins — one of the smallest dolphin species in the world — surfaces briefly with a soft blow, circles back to inspect our boat, then vanishes beneath the glassy water. Soon after, a sleek black snout and two inky eyes blink right at me, before disappearing again: a South American sea lion searching for breakfast. “The animals are different here,” says Dani. “They come close. Sometimes birds will land on your hand — it’s like they’re trying to tell you something.”

Ahead, Dani points out a glacier hanging between the mountains, its ice-blue tongue appearing to spill directly into the fjord. The only sign of human life is a thin curl of smoke rising from a wooden house perched high above the shoreline. A reclusive farmer lives there, Dani tells me. A ramshackle wooden boat moored below the house is his transport to the mainland, but it looks like it hasn’t left the jetty in years.

“People say there’s a secret here,” Dani states as we make our way back to the lodge. She moved here from central Chile a year ago, drawn by something she still struggles to explain. “But it’s something only people who come can understand. And even when they leave, they still can’t describe it.”

Back on land that afternoon, I sink into one of the lodge’s natural hot springs. The stone pool sits wedged between fjord and forest, where giant ferns and branches spill over the water. Floating on my back, I watch wisps of steam curl upwards through the trees, leaves and moss hanging so close to my face I can feel cool droplets of moisture on my skin.

As I think about a cold plunge in the fjord, a ringed kingfisher — one of the largest kingfisher species in the world — lands right on the edge of the pool, less than a metre from me. Standing tall, with a shaggy crest and chestnut-coloured belly, it fixes me with an unwavering stare. For a moment, neither of us moves. I can hear water trickling through the forest behind me and the distant lap of the fjord below. Seconds stretch into what feels like minutes before the bird cocks its head strangely to one side and disappears between the trees.

In the days that follow, I travel deeper into Patagonia Verde’s fjords and valleys to watch chunks of ice thunder from the face of San Rafael Glacier and raft the Futaleufú, one of the greatest whitewater rivers in the world. Yet when I think back to this wild, beautiful corner of southern Chile, it’s not just the roar of falling ice or whitewater that I remember. It’s the mist drifting through the forest canopy and rainwater pattering on the giant nalca leaves. It’s the blow of a dolphin breaking the silence of the fjord and a kingfisher staring back at me from the edge of a jungle hot spring. Perhaps that’s what my guide Dani meant when she spoke of a “secret” in these parts — those rare moments when you truly feel connected to the natural world.