San Rafael Glacier
Glaciar San Rafael
Interesting facts
- The lagoon is home to a resident group of leopard seals, an Antarctic species rarely settled this far north.
- Historical records suggest the glacier only began reaching the water as a tidewater glacier sometime between 1741 and 1766.
- The Spanish explorer Bartolomé Gallardo reached the lagoon in the mid-1670s, the first recorded European visit.
- The glacier's ice averages nearly 300 metres thick, and its total volume is estimated at about 211 cubic kilometres.
- The lagoon covers about 123 square kilometres and drains north to the Moraleda Channel through the aptly named Río Témpanos, 'Iceberg River'.
- South of the lagoon lies the narrow Isthmus of Ofqui, where a canal to link it with the Gulf of Penas has long been proposed.
- A weather station at San Rafael measured about 4,440 millimetres of rain a year in the early 1980s, and the ice field above gets even more.
- The surrounding park shelters black-browed albatrosses, black-necked swans, Chilean dolphins and the marine otter.
- The Jesuit missionary José García Alsué visited the lagoon in 1766.
Why it is worth it
San Rafael Glacier is a great tongue of ice spilling west from the Northern Patagonian Ice Field in Chile's Aysén region, into the round lagoon of Laguna San Rafael. It is one of the main outlet glaciers of the ice field, covering more than 700 square kilometres from summits around 4,000 metres down to sea level, and it is often described as the tidewater glacier closest to the equator — remarkable at a latitude of about 46° south, roughly that of central France in the northern hemisphere.
The lagoon is connected to the sea, and the glacier calves into it along a broad, jagged front. The lagoon is littered with icebergs of every size, from small floes to great sculpted blocks, their undersides in that intense glacial blue that appears where old dense ice has been washed by water. Around it the scene is wild and wet: dense forest running down to the shore, mountains disappearing into cloud, and the ice field itself visible on clear days as a white plateau above everything.
The glacier is shrinking fast. When the Chilean naval officer Enrique Simpson visited in 1871 aboard the corvette Chacabuco, its front stood about 10 kilometres further forward than it does now; the retreat has opened up the lagoon and is one of the clearest pictures in South America of what warming does to ice. The glacier lies within Laguna San Rafael National Park, created in 1959 and covering more than 17,000 square kilometres including the whole Northern Patagonian Ice Field; UNESCO recognised the area as a biosphere reserve in 1979.
For most visitors the experience is a long day on the water: a voyage through fjords and channels that ends with smaller boats nosing among the icebergs towards the face, listening for the boom of a collapse.
Getting there
Most visits are by boat from Puerto Chacabuco, the port about 80 km west of Coyhaique; the catamaran trip takes around four hours each way, and the nearest town to the glacier itself is Puerto Aysén, about 170 km away in a straight line. Balmaceda Airport (BBA), about 187 km away and an hour's drive from Coyhaique, has flights from Santiago.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- San Rafael Lagoon 8.5 km · lagoon
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The San Rafael Glacier is one of the major outlet glaciers of the Northern Patagonian Ice Field in southern Chile and is the tidewater glacier nearest the equator. It calves into the Laguna San Rafael and is contained within Laguna San Rafael National Park.
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