Kaleidoscope Travel Blog

Here’s the good news, ecotourism is booming in Patagonia and throughout the world. In fact, it’s estimated that the ecotourism sector is growing around 5% each year, which is just what’s needed in the ecologically delicate environment of Patagonia.

Now here’s the bad news. The rise in popularity of green tourism has caused some of the less scrupulous hotels and tourism suppliers to take advantage of this global trend by simply slapping the eco-friendly badge on their products without doing the legwork to ensure that they truly are environmentally friendly. In other words, they’re all talk and no composting toilets. There’s even a name for this dubious practice which has come to be known as ‘greenwashing’.

Unfortunately, that means it’s no longer enough to book a vacation in Patagonia with a supplier sporting an eco-friendly label and then forget all about it, assuming you’ve done your bit. These days, you’re going to have to get savvy if you want to be sure you’re making a difference in the right way. That’s why we’ve put together our six steps to help you dodge the eco-pretenders!

Patagonia is usually seen as a place of monumental landscapes, uninhabited expanses of grassland, forests or glaciers, a land devoid of human influence. Yet if we look a little closer we see that Patagonia has a complex human history that stretches back far into the unseen past, a history that we can still find traces of today. When the first European explorers reached the far south of the Latin American continent they found large footprints and saw tall figures on the shores, dubbing them the Patagon giants. Unfortunately, although many of the region’s indigenous peoples were only contacted by Europeans for the first time in the late 19th Century, most disappeared before it was possible to learn and record much about them. However it is still possible to find clues to their existence tucked away in the vast wilds of Patagonia. 

A visit to the Mylodon’s Cave in Chilean Patagonia is often billed as a way to break up the long overland journey from Punta Arenas airport to Torres del Paine National Park. The shallow cave was the site of the 1895 discovery of a large piece of what turned out to be giant sloth, or mylodon, skin. Today, the cave is preserved as a monument to the discovery of the mylodon but since most of the remains are no longer within the cave itself, is it really worth the visit? And rather than thinking of the cave as a stop-off on the way to Torres del Paine, does it deserve to be seen as an attraction in its own right? We went to find out, and the answer was a resounding yes!