Pumalín Park, the conservation treasure in Chilean Patagonia

The Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park inaugurated its visitor center this Monday, a place to bring the stranger closer to the forest Chilean known as Evergreen, temperate and rainy.

This immersive experience simulates with smells, sounds, images and narrations a tour of the key areas of Pumalín Park, an initiative created for all conservation audiences.

“The last twenty years have been like an earthquake of change. There is no doubt that we are going to recover the relationship between nature and human beings. We are on time, just, but on time“, Kristine Tompkins, co-founder of the Patagonia brand, creator of Rewilding Chile and widow of American philanthropist Douglas Tompkins, told EFE in Pumalín National Park.

At 73 years old, Tompkins explained the great change in the way we look at nature from when she was a girl to how it is now, and assures that the great motivation among young people is “the fear they have of their future, where they imagine a planet in which not everything is well.”

Pumalín, translation of the Huilliche indigenous language, means ‘Place of water’, Well, the green of its great forest immensity and its great variety of fauna and flora comes from that asset that is so scarce and necessary in Chile.

He 25% of the ancient larch forests in all of Chile are found in this great natural paradise of 402,392 hectares, of which 293,338 were donated by Tompkins.

“Lack of conservation culture”

“The park has everything it needs, although it requires more visits, especially from young people so that they understand that each of us has a challenge, and that just as we treat our families and friends well, the trees and rivers also have friends, and you have to treat them well”Tompkins explained.

Carolina Morango, executive director of the Rewilding Chile Foundation, explained to EFE from this Nature Sanctuary, declared in 2005, that since the beginning of the creation of this natural reserve the main challenge was “lack of understanding due to lack of conservation culture”something they are still working on.

“We need financing, in addition to care. It has to do with the country’s view of conservation, and it is a great challenge. We must try to revolutionize this view of nature as an investment and not as an expense.”Morango denounced.

The official name of Parque Pumalín, to which Douglas Tompkins is now added, was modified after the tragic death of the key person in this entire journey, Douglas Tompkins, creator of this place, who died in 2015 in a kayak accident.

Kristine Tompkins handed over to Chile in April 2019, three years after the death of her husband, tens of thousands of hectares of Patagonian land that the founder of the North Face brand had purchased since the beginning of the 1990s for its conservation and is, so far, the largest donation of private land in history.

Cape Froward, next project

In the midst of the planet’s climate crisis, the Rewilding Foundation together with Kristine Tompkins work on many species conservation projects in Chile and Argentina.

“We will not stop contributing something every day to try to reverse climate change for future generations,” Morango stated.

Their next project is located in the extreme south of the country, at Cape Froward, at the end of the Strait of Magellan, where the huemul, a native Chilean deer, lives and is considered the southernmost nesting place for the red canquén, both endangered species. of extinction.

Additionally, Tompkins is also involved in jaguar repopulation projects in the southwestern United States and in the northeast to bring back pumas.

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