Already inhabited by the ancestors of the Aónikenk people, over 9000 years ago, these pedestrian, nomadic, Paleoindian people were most likely astonished by the rocky sculpture emerging lonely on the flowered steppe.
In 1878, Florence Dixie, a British aristocrat along with her husband, sisters, and brothers, became the first tourists visiting Patagonia, horse riding through the pampa until running into what they baptised as Cleopatra Needles, known today as Torres del Paine.
It’s a royal landscape, which has brought people from all over the world to admire its beauty and virtuous ecosystem, making it the protagonist of national tourism, the postcard landscape for admiration, storytelling, and exploration.
Only some can enjoy the visual spectacle of the Torres del Paine and its surroundings, nested in private land inherited from privileged colonisers, whose descendants can now enjoy the ancient Cleopatra Needles as background view.
Georeading
The rocky crust of the Earth thickens and grows enriched by magma, masses of molten rock that just like the bloodstream in our bodies flow through the depths of the Earth form its bowels to the surface.
When a bubble of magma finally reaches the thin and cold crust, it encounters resistance. Hot and lighter than its surroundings, the molten rock searches for a way upwards through fractures, melting softer rocks on its way up until perhaps reaching the surface, where it instantaneously freezes under the blue sky, and finally becomes a rock.
Most times, though, the mass of magma stops midway unable to find a pathway upwards, forced to remain as a bubble of molten rock, kilometres deep into the Earth. There, it slowly cools down, taking the time to becomes a complex version of itself as the molten rocks slowly turn into crystallized minerals.
The crystal magma now needs to patiently wait for intense tectonic forces for it to be uplifted enough to see the sunlight. This long story is what the Torres del Paine Massif experienced for now to be proudly displayed on the Patagonian lands.