Location: Aisen, Chile
Area: 4,305,683 acres
Length of
glacier: 6 mi (9 km)
The Laguna San Rafael National Park (Spanish Parque Nacional Laguna San Rafael) is located in Chile in the Región de Aisén. It is a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
You can get to this park by sea or by land. In the first case, there are tourist service companies in the region that offer trips to the lagoon departing from Puerto Montt or from Puerto Chacabuco. Travel time from Puerto Chacabuco is 16 hours. By land, it can be accessed from the town of Puerto Río Tranquilo to Bahía Exploradores, by a gravel road built in 2001. From Bahía Exploradores you can access the lagoon by boat, with a travel time that takes about 2.5 hours . It is possible to access from September to April.
The national park is 120 km south of Puerto Chacabuco and has an area
of 17,420 km², the highest mountain is Monte San Valentín with a height
of 4058 meters. Much of the national park lies on the Taitao Peninsula.
On the Chilean mainland are the vast glaciated areas of the northern
Patagonian Ice Field (Campo de Hielo Norte).
The journey is
usually via Coyhaique by plane and then to Puerto Aysén. Then take a
ferry to the San Rafael Glacier via Puerto Chacabuco. The main tourist
destination is the glacier about 50 km west of Mount San Valentín. Here
the huge glacier flows into the Laguna San Rafael. It is part of the
Northern Ice Field (Campo de Hielo Norte). It is the glacier closest to
the equator that flows into a body of water. The glacier is 45 km long
and 2.5 km wide. The glacier walls can be over 70 m high. Tourists are
brought nearby by boat. However, it is dangerous to drive too close to
the glacier, as the breaking ice masses can trigger large tidal waves.
The glacier is one of the fastest flowing ice streams on earth. At the
end of the 19th century, the San Rafael Glacier was still a Piedmont
glacier, the glacier's ice spreads far into Laguna San Rafael. Since
then it has lost about 11.5% of its area, the glacier tongue no longer
extends into the laguna.
In 1960, the ground in the area subsided
as a result of the Valdivia earthquake. Since then, the Laguna San
Rafael has been connected to the Pacific via the Río Témpanos (Eng.
"Iceberg River").
The area is very rainy with up to 5000
millimeters of precipitation per year and is quite cold with an average
temperature of 5 °C.
Due to the climate, only a few species of trees grow in the huge park. The most important tree species are Southern beech of Magellan and Coihue, Chilean yew tree, Glossy southern beech, trees of the Winteraceae and Atherospermataceae families, Chilean river cedar, Southern beech Lenga and cypress. Shrubs found are Desfontainia spinosa, box-leaved barberry, scarlet fuchsia and various heathers.
Mainly seabirds and enormous fish stocks live here, larger mammals are rarely found due to the temperatures. Birds present are black-necked swans, gulls of the genus Larus, condors, cormorants, red-throated tapaculos and black-throated wagtails. Among the mammals there are pudus, they are the smallest deer in the world. In addition, Chilean forest cats, coastal otters, Andean deer and Andean jackals live in the national park.
Laguna San Rafael National Park was established in 1959 and is managed by the Chilean forest authority CONAF. UNESCO declared the national park a biosphere reserve in 1979.
The Hidroaysén project, approved by the first government of Michelle Bachelet (2007-2010) and canceled in 2017, widely rejected by environmentalists, proposed the construction of five hydroelectric plants, two of which would be located on the Baker River. Part of the wall of one of the latter (called Baker 2), would pass through this national park, causing irreversible damage to it.
The Laguna San Rafael National Park has a protection of its subsoil
as a place of scientific interest for mining purposes, as established in
article 17 of the Mining Code. These tasks can only be carried out with
a written permit from the President of the Republic and also signed by
the Minister of Mining.
The condition of place of scientific
interest for mining purposes was established by Supreme Decree No. 133
of August 29, 1989 and published on October 26, 1989.5 which establishes
the protection polygon.