At the very bottom of mainland South America, where the Strait of Magellan bends between two oceans, a national park is on its way. On Tuesday 3 November, Kristine Tompkins, president of Fundación Rewilding Chile, and Carolina Morgado, its executive director, signed a supplementary agreement with Catalina Parot, Chile's Minister of National Assets, Francisca Toledo, Minister of the Environment, and Tomás Saratscheff, national director of the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Service. It sets out a further gift of 22,333 hectares at Cape Froward, in the Magallanes region. That land joins 127,302 hectares the foundation has already given, registered in the State's name in November 2025, and public protected lands at Río Batchelor and Cape Froward set aside in 2006. Together they make about 183,000 hectares for the future Cape Froward National Park. Tompkins says the park will be "a contribution not only to Chile, but to the entire world."

Read the full story: Chile tendrá un nuevo parque nacional de 183 mil hectáreas en el sur del país, by Colomba Bolognesi, The Clinic (in Spanish).

Cape Froward headlands under rolling cloud above the Strait of Magellan
Cape Froward from the Strait of Magellan. Photograph: Serge Ouachée, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 3.0.

Cape Froward holds ancient subantarctic forest, home to the Guaitecas cypress, the southernmost conifer on Earth, and wide peatlands that capture and store carbon. Huemul deer live here, and close by is the southernmost known nesting site of the ruddy headed goose. It is the ancestral territory of the Kawésqar people, who have travelled the Strait of Magellan for thousands of years, and the park's creation now moves through Indigenous consultation, the step it is on today. "We are incredibly proud to continue advancing the creation of this national park, a conservation initiative supported by philanthropists from Chile and around the world," says Morgado. Walkers already follow the Cape Froward Heritage Route across this country, and one day they will walk it inside a national park.

An Earth to Sea News story, drawn from Rewilding Chile, the Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales and The Clinic (3 November 2026). Photographs: as credited in captions.