Torres del Paine: Granite Spires, Glaciers and Treks in Chilean Patagonia

Few mountains look as unreal as the Towers of Paine. Three sheer granite pillars, up to about 2,500 metres high, rise from the Patagonian steppe in southern Chile, surrounded by turquoise lakes, hanging glaciers and the dark-capped horns of Los Cuernos. Torres del Paine National Park, created in 1959 and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1978, is now one of the great trekking destinations of South America.

Torres del Paine National Park at a glance

The park covers 181,414 hectares in Chile’s Magallanes region, 112 km north of Puerto Natales and 312 km north of Punta Arenas. It began life on 13 May 1959 as the Parque Nacional de Turismo Lago Grey and took its present name in 1970. Visitor numbers have grown fast: about 305,000 people came in 2019.

The park is far more than its towers. Lakes Pehoé, Nordenskjöld and Grey fill the glacial valleys around the massif, and Grey Glacier, about 15 km long and split into two arms, flows in from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Guanacos graze the open slopes, pumas hunt them, and Darwin’s rhea strides across the grassland.

The peaks: towers, horns and Paine Grande

The Cordillera del Paine is a compact group of summits on the eastern side of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Published heights vary and many older figures were too high, but the main peaks are roughly:

• Cerro Paine Grande, the highest at 2,884 m, measured by GPS after a 2011 ascent (older sources claimed over 3,000 m)
• Torre Sur (South Tower), about 2,500 m, probably the tallest of the three
• Torre Central, about 2,460 m
• Torre Norte (North Tower), about 2,260 m
• Cuerno Principal, the highest of Los Cuernos, about 2,100 m

The towers became a magnet for climbers. Guido Monzino’s expedition first climbed the North Tower in 1958; Chris Bonington and Don Whillans topped the Central Tower in 1963, the same year Armando Aste climbed the South Tower. In 2017 a Belgian team made the first free ascent of the Central Tower’s roughly 1,200 m rock face.

Why the rock has two colours

The striking two-tone look of Los Cuernos tells the story of the range. About 12.5 million years ago, magma pushed up into older layers of Cretaceous sedimentary rock and cooled underground into a laccolith, a lens-shaped body of pale granite above grey gabbro and diorite. Zircon dating shows the magma crystallised over only about 160,000 years. Uplift and erosion later stripped most of the soft cover, and glaciers carved the granite into towers and horns, leaving caps of dark, folded sediment perched on top of the lighter rock.

Time-lapse: three days of Patagonian weather

Patagonian weather can change in minutes, and the time-lapse below, by GBTimelapse, compresses three days of cloud, rain, sunlight and moonlight around the massif into a few minutes of film. Watch how the towers vanish into cloud and return under completely different light.

Granite and light are a favourite pairing on Snow Addiction: compare granite landscapes in Yosemite and the Matterhorn under different photographic conditions.

Visiting Torres del Paine: treks, season and history

• Best season: September to April, the southern spring, summer and early autumn.
• The W trek takes 3 to 5 days and covers about 80 km, taking in the base of the towers and Grey Glacier.
• The O circuit adds the wild back side of the massif: about 130 km in 7 to 9 days.
• Gateway: Puerto Natales is the main base, with Punta Arenas the regional hub.

Treat fire with great care and follow park rules. Three big fires started by visitors have burned the park: about 150 km² in 1985, 155 km² in 2005 and 176 km² in the summer of 2011–12.

The first well-known foreign tourists here were the British writer Lady Florence Dixie and her party, whose book Across Patagonia (1880) compared the towers to Cleopatra’s Needles. For more Patagonian ice, read about walking on the Perito Moreno Glacier across the border in Argentina.

Related reading

• Chilean Andes Snowboarding: Funner Filete
• Walking on Perito Moreno Glacier with Richard Watson
• Stunning Snow Patterns by Simon Beck (Snow Art)
• A Guide to Snowflakes: Plates, Dendrites, Columns and Rime

Sources