Travel to Torres del Paine

Torres del Paine owes its dramatic landscape to a collision between fire and ice that began 12 million years ago. Tectonic forces pushed a mass of molten granite, known as a laccolith, upward through older layers of sedimentary rock. Over millennia, glaciers carved away the softer stone and exposed the harder granite beneath, sculpting the three iconic towers, the horn-shaped peaks of Los Cuernos, and the broad summit of Monte Paine Grande at 3,050 meters.

The glaciers never finished their work. The Southern Patagonian Ice Field, stretching 350 kilometers along the Andes and ranking as the third-largest ice mass on Earth after Antarctica and Greenland, still feeds Grey Glacier as it flows into Lago Grey with a face spanning roughly 6 kilometers. Over the past three decades, Grey Glacier has retreated approximately 2 kilometers, a visible reminder that this landscape is still actively changing. Turquoise lakes, colored by suspended rock flour, fill the valleys between peaks.