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The beguiling world of Neruda's Patagonia

Neruda particularly loved Chile's Patagonia - getty
Neruda particularly loved Chile's Patagonia - getty

Sara Wheeler follows the path of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda through Chile and explores his love of ‘the thin country’ 

In Chacabuco valley a flock of upland geese rose in unison, hovering over the steppe like washing on a line. Behind them, the gap-toothed Andes rippled in a late mist blown off the ocean. I drove high and east in that crepuscular light, the road a slender precipice. A solitary condor described circles above swathes of southern beech. Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda wrote of these southern trees, “He who does not know the Chilean forests, does not know the planet.”

Neruda (1904-1973) is the best-known poet to emerge from South America. He believed poetry was not an elite pursuit: his verses were statements of solidarity addressed to fellow Chileans. When he died, shortly after Pinochet’s military coup, his disciples like to say it was of a broken heart, but Neruda did have prostate cancer at the time.

He was a communist, a diplomat, a bon viveur and a committed collector: at three of his long-term homes the visitor can inspect troves of coloured glass and golden-haired figureheads culled from shipyards. Isla Negra is the most famous of the residences, squatting on a rocky outcrop a couple of hours’ drive from Santiago, the capital. Despite a heterogeneously glorious treasury of stuff, a unifying theme emerges, and it is Neruda’s love for what he called “the thin country”.

Pablo Neruda - getty
Pablo Neruda - getty

In his memoirs he wrote of childhood horse rides through freshly washed forest. “My world expanded upward and outward along the towering mud trails… I encountered the silence or the sound of wild birds, the sudden outburst of a flowering tree dressed in scarlet robes like a gigantic bishop of the mountains, or snowed under by a riot of blossoms.” Poems conjure bellflowers dangling like drops of blood, cold pearls of light in the fjords and a night “drilled through by thousands of insects”.

The beguiling world of Neruda’s Chilean Patagonia (smaller and less well known than its Argentinian counterpart) beckons in troubled times. The ratio of people to square kilometre is 1:1. In the UK, it’s 273; in the US, 36. (Neruda was born in Parral just north of Patagonia and his roots remained in the green and fecund south.) I drove for five hours one day without seeing another car. A visitor should head for Ruta de los Parques, a road created in 2018 linking 17 national parks. The Ruta forms part of the fabled Carretera Austral, or Southern Highway, which unravels 1,200 kilometres (770 miles) from Puerto Montt to Villa O’Higgins. (It changes name at the northern terminus, but basically you could keep rolling until you reached Vancouver.)

Chacabuco valley, Chile - getty
Chacabuco valley, Chile - getty

When land splinters, ferries take up the baton. Heading north on the Ruta from Parque Patagonia, I entered the ferny zone – by Puyuhuapi it was very ferny indeed, and Chilean dolphins were fluking in the fjords. Parque Pumalín consists of almost a million acres of temperate evergreen rainforest spiked with mountains and glaciers. It is an attenuated landscape with just 10 species of mammals and 20 of trees, the latter including, close to Fandango Bridge, a 3,500-year-old alerce, a rain-absorbing hardwood. On the scrub next to it, huet-huet birds whooped.

Parque Pumalín - getty
Parque Pumalín - getty

Far to the south, after the Carretera Austral collapses, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago drips off the tail of the continent like water from a leaky tap. The largest island, Isla Navarino, is home to the southernmost permanent settlement in the world. This is a region, Neruda suggested, where the curve on the globe turns steeply inwards. Navarino is a harsh and frigid place.

Isla Navarino - getty
Isla Navarino - getty

The westerlies come freighted with rain and snow. Lumpy steamer ducks careered over the tussock grass when I was there, vapour dissolving off their coats. Grass had grown over mounds of shells and ash left by Yahgan men and women who once paddled beech-bark canoes in the inlets of the cold Beagle Channel. (Neruda’s 1950 collection Canto General is a cultural song of praise to the people of pre-Spanish Latin America.) The long gone Yaghan, who lived off shellfish, spoke five mutually intelligible dialects that together constituted a linguistic group unrelated to any other.

Towards the end of his life Neruda wrote less about politics and more about the natural world of his beloved southern Chile.

He believed landscape was sacred. In these dark times of plague we might follow him, through his poems and over the uninfected earth of his Pacific coast “until all the light in the world has the oneness of the ocean”.