San Rafael Lagoon

At the head of a remote inlet on Chile's Pacific coast, a wall of blue ice breaks into a lagoon studded with floating icebergs. Laguna San Rafael is the meeting point of sea and glacier in the far north of Patagonia: the San Rafael Glacier pours down from the Northern Patagonian Ice Field and ends directly in the water, calving blocks of ice that drift across the lagoon. It is described as the tidewater glacier closest to the equator, an outlier of polar landscape at around 46 degrees south.

The lagoon covers roughly 123 square kilometres and is enclosed on the south by the Isthmus of Ofqui, a narrow neck of land that separates it from the Gulf of Penas. To the north the Témpanos River, whose name means "river of icebergs", links it to the Moraleda Channel and the open sea. The glacier itself drains about 760 square kilometres of ice. Above it rise the peaks of the ice field, among them Monte San Valentín, Cerro Arenales and Cerro Hyades, and the high ground receives more than 6,000 mm of precipitation a year, the snow that keeps this glacier alive. Studies of its history suggest that the San Rafael became a tidewater glacier sometime between 1741 and 1766; in the centuries since, the ice front has retreated, enlarging the lagoon.

Spanish navigators reached the lagoon in the 1670s, and Bartolomé Gallardo is credited with recording it in November 1674. Later visitors included José García Alsué in 1766 and the Chilean naval officer Enrique Simpson, who explored the area in 1872. Since 1959 the lagoon and its surroundings have been part of Laguna San Rafael National Park, one of the largest protected areas in Chile at some 17,420 square kilometres, which also takes in the whole Northern Patagonian Ice Field. UNESCO named it a World Biosphere Reserve in 1979. There are no roads to the lagoon; it remains a place reached only across water or from the air.

Getting there

The lagoon lies in Chile's Aysén Region. The nearest town is Puerto Aysén, about 170 km away in a straight line; boats to the lagoon sail from neighbouring Puerto Chacabuco through the fjords and channels of the coast. A second approach starts at Puerto Río Tranquilo on Lake General Carrera, from where a road runs about 91 km to Bahía Exploradores on the coast. The nearest airport is Balmaceda (BBA), about 192 km away.