Marble Caves (General Carrera Lake)

The Marble Cathedral is a great block of marble standing in the turquoise water of General Carrera Lake in Chilean Patagonia, hollowed through by the lake itself into arches, pillars and vaulted passages. Together with the smaller Marble Chapel and the Marble Caverns cut into the nearby shore, it forms the formations known in Spanish as the Capillas de Mármol, protected as a nature sanctuary since 1994. The rock is Palaeozoic marble, hundreds of millions of years old; the caverns are recent, carved by waves since the glaciers withdrew and left the lake behind.

The colours are what people come for. The marble is mostly white and pale grey, veined and banded with blue and pink, and the smooth, scalloped walls inside the arches pick up the colour of the glacial water beneath them. Depending on the light and the season, the stone shifts from cream to blue to aquamarine, and the ceilings ripple with reflected light. Up close, the surface is sculpted into soft hollows by the water, as if the rock had been poured rather than cut.

General Carrera Lake is itself remarkable: the largest lake in Chile, of glacial origin, around 586 metres deep at its deepest, and shared with Argentina, where its eastern part is called Lake Buenos Aires. Its milky blue-green colour, set against the brown and snow-streaked Andes, makes the approach to the Cathedral half the experience. Boats and kayaks nose between the columns and into the passages, and the best of the formations can only really be understood from water level.

Getting there

Boat and kayak trips leave from Puerto Río Tranquilo, a village on the Carretera Austral (Route 7) on the shore of the lake. Coyhaique, the regional capital, is about 126 km away in a straight line, but by road it is a drive of roughly four hours south along the Carretera Austral. The nearest airport is Balmaceda Airport (BBA), about 108 km away in a straight line, which serves the Coyhaique area; from there the route continues by road.