Cascada de Ventisquero Colgante

High above a rainforest valley in Chilean Patagonia, a tongue of ice hangs over the lip of a cliff, and from beneath it a band of meltwater drops in a single vertical plunge before sliding down a tilted shelf of bedrock. The Ventisquero Colgante, the "hanging glacier", and the falls it feeds are the emblem of Queulat National Park. Because the spot is remote and rarely measured, the height of the falls is uncertain: a cautious estimate is about 550 metres and it may be closer to 600, which would place it among the tallest waterfalls in South America. The falls average about 30 metres wide.

The glacier spills from the Queulat ice cap, an icefield of about 80 square kilometres centred on a summit of 1,889 metres, the largest of the two small ice fields in the park. Its meltwater runs into the Témpanos River and on to the Puyuhuapi Channel and the Pacific. When the naval officer Enrique Simpson Baeza explored this coast in 1875, the ice reportedly came to within about a hundred metres of the channel; it has since retreated to some 8 km from it. The Chono people called the area Queolat, a name said to mean "the sound of waterfalls".

The park around it covers 1,541 square kilometres of glacier-capped peaks, some above 2,000 metres, and Valdivian temperate rainforest, where parts of the park receive up to 4,000 mm of rain a year. Coihue and tepa trees rise over an undergrowth of bamboo-like quila and nalca, a plant with enormous leaves, while southern beech species take over higher up. Pudú, the tiny Andean deer, and the kodkod, a small wild cat, live in the forest along with Magellanic woodpeckers and chucao tapaculos; southern river otters and black-necked swans live along the shores. In 1766 the Jesuit José García Alsue passed through in search of the legendary City of the Caesars. The region stayed largely out of reach until the Carretera Austral was built through it in 1982, and the national park was created the following year.

Getting there

The falls lie in Queulat National Park in Chile's Aysén Region, about 16 km south of the village of Puyuhuapi; the Carretera Austral runs through the park. The nearest larger town is Puerto Aysén, about 108 km away, and the nearest airport is Balmaceda Airport (BBA), about 176 km away.