One of the world’s most celebrated road trips owes its existence to a dictator’s obsession. It was the 1970s, and Augusto Pinochet had just staged a brutal military coup to take control of Chile. Like many despots, he was paranoid: Among his greatest fears was that the isolated south might one day drift into Argentina’s orbit. So, in 1976, he ordered the construction of an audacious highway running latitudinally through Northern Patagonia, a land where craggy mountains crumble into fjords, volcanoes poke through clouds, and dense rainforests swallow the light.
The resulting Carretera Austral (Southern Highway in English) bound together that distant frontier to the Chilean state by force of gravel, dynamite, and military will. Today, it begins at an inlet of the Pacific, near the port city of Puerto Montt, and ends—770 miles and four car ferries later—in the frontier outpost of Villa O’Higgins. Fifty years after construction began, surrounding communities are taking stock of what the road has delivered and what the decades ahead might bring as it increasingly draws tourists to natural wonders along the route.
In early April, I flew from my home in Santiago to the lone commercial airport along the Carretera Austral, just outside the four-block outpost of Balmaceda. The road south from Balmaceda unspools for 45 miles through snaggletooth peaks and wind-combed valleys, before arriving at Villa Cerro Castillo, an eight-block village dwarfed by its namesake massif. Until the 1970s, towns like this in Chile’s sparsely populated Aysén Region were effectively cut off from the rest of the country. To get around, ranchers relied on horses, boats, and remote airstrips, and access to goods and services was limited.
That changed with the construction of the Carretera Austral. This rugged highway connected Aysén’s isolated communities to the rest of Chile and ushered in a new era of tourism: Since 1976, the soul-stirring landscapes that first drew hitchhikers and dirt-bag cyclists have begun to lure jetsetters who want to appreciate the views from boutique lodges. One of the newest is Alto Castillo, a five-cabin hotel with soaring views over Cerro Castillo National Park. The property was opened in late 2023 by Chilean Carolina Cerda and her Argentine husband Adrián Pintos on a 185-acre hilltop estate. “People really wanted to visit this part of Patagonia, but accommodations were simple,” Cerda explained, fussing over afternoon black tea and homebaked butter cookies as we chatted. “Now, tourism is going in a different direction, but it’s not about excessive luxury; visitors still want to feel like they’re in Patagonia.”
Framed in native lenga wood, the rustic-chic cabins at Alto Castillo feature Mapuche textiles, wicker Chimbarongo baskets, and paintings honoring the gauchos who first settled these lands. Wood-fired Salamander stoves combat cool evenings, and multi-course dinners unspool at a long communal table. I dined with a German family who’d traveled the Carretera Austral from top to bottom over three weeks. “Every day—really every bend in the road—we’ve seen a remarkably different landscape,” the father, Christian, shared, as we picked at pork roast and sipped on carmenere from Vinos Patagonia.
