Fragments of land that emerge across the Pacific coast, extending throughout the Patagonian seas with an imposing and lone elegance. They spread one by one progressing through the channels, while in a diversity in opacity of the planes appearing in the horizon reveal their actual distance.
Ancestors navigated in their canoes between these giants covered with forest while experiencing the cold coastal mist. This is the ancient kawésqar territory, one that few can admire due to its remoteness and exclusive access through the sea.
Today these are the transit landscapes of kawésqar and inhabitants of Puerto Edén. These archipielagos have an identity of their own, their unique weather, humidity, fauna, and flora, which makes them virtually impossible to explore due to their thick forests and imposing steepness. It’s as though they were on the other side of the planet and not in Patagonian land.
Georeading
The region of the Patagonian channels is made of a massive granitic rock. Granite is made of crystals of several minerals, which build themselves while magma is slowly cooling down as a bubble in the depths of the Earth. Crystals grow one next to the other, knitting a net among themselves, with tight arms of solid bonds. This makes granite a strong and resistant rock.
Magmas were created when the Andean orogeny begun; these originated at the Early Cretaceous and are thus the eroded roots of an ancient version of the Andean Cordillera. Thanks to their resistance, granite bodies stand out in the landscape, with altitudes higher than their surroundings and peaks rounded by ice that is no longer there.
Their grey and pink rocks appear to reflect the light in the infinite faces of their crystals, in these mirrors that reflect the silent beauty of our internal labyrinths.
It is easy to get lost in these channels and fjords, rough and where green patches of dense jungle clutch to the cracks in the rock. In the highlands nothing survives; the vegetation is sharply interrupted, perishing against the cold temperatures and fierce westerlies.