Torres del Paine National Park: National Landscapes and Economic Power in the Chilean Andes

• In Event: Modern Orogenesis: Mountains and the Human Imagination

Abstract

Torres del Paine National Park (first called Lago Grey)—a landscape with vertical ice and jagged rock towers shaped by ferocious wind, horizontally intersecting with a near-treeless grassland occasionally rippled with turquoise lakes braided together by the Rio Paine. This national park was designated as such by the Chilean national government in 1959 and subsequently expanded thrice. In this case, local advocates played active roles in creating the park, and the landscape became a way to foreground overarching proximities in a region far from centralized economic power. This was not a pristine or ignored landscape devoid of industrial pressures or primitive in its abandonment, yet it has come to be one of the most recognizable symbols of the Chilean environment due in part to the mountain vistas.

Author

• Emily Wakild, Boise State University