Experience a Gentler Patagonia in Chile's Lake District
One of my clients and his girlfriend began their current trip in Buenos Aires, took a day trip to Uruguay (on my own list!), and made their way today to the epic landscapes of Torres del Paine national park in Chilean Patagonia. From there, they'll head back north to explore more natural wonders at Chile's second-largest lake, Lake Llanquihue in Puerto Varas. They'll see snow-capped mountains, Calbuco Volcano, and Petrohué waterfall before going home. This area is a little lesser-known, and worth a visit!
Excerpt of 6/30/2026 Virtuoso article by Josie Sexton can be found here.
A softer corner of the wild south swaps summit fever for slow adventure.
There are two types of people on the flight from Santiago to Patagonia: the ones in hiking boots and backpacks, and those wearing tennies and wheeling their luggage. I’m with the latter. Unlike most travelers I know who’ve made this journey – the backcountry pros who pack in and out with the ease of preparing a school lunch – I didn’t come to Patagonia to climb El Chaltén or trek a Torres del Paine circuit. Respectfully, I’ll take my adventures much gentler.
Chile’s Lake District (technically northern Patagonia) is where my people – the other rollaboarders – and I deplane in Puerto Montt, more than 500 miles south of the Chilean capital. The more intrepid types wing another 700 miles to Puerto Natales, near the continent’s southern end.
This region spoke to me as someone who’s outdoorsy to an extent, adventurous within reason, up for a challenge provided a few caveats. Here, at the crossroads between civilization and wilderness, more than a dozen glacial lakes cover the countryside; the panoramic villages on their shores call to artists, musicians, kayakers, and cyclists. A handful of national parks lie within day-tripping distance – their trails crisscross Valdivian rainforests, home to the monkey puzzle tree and Patagonian cypress. Seventeen volcanoes form a near continuous wall down this section of the Andes. Less alarming but just as dramatic: Along the coast, emerald fjords fork inland from the Pacific.
Visitors gravitate toward Pucón, the region’s northern adventure capital, built for trekkers and white-water rafters, or Puerto Varas in the south, which leans into its cultural cachet as a nineteenth-century German settlement with storybook timber-framed houses and gabled churches. The towns’ presiding volcanoes distinguish them too: Looming over Pucón, Villarrica last erupted in 2015 and occasionally still glows and sputters, while Osorno sits dormant as of 1869 – a more benevolent presence above Puerto Varas. I choose the second option.
From Hotel Awa, a lakefront lodge near Puerto Varas, I’ll explore the cypress woods and waterways of Alerce Andino and Vicente Pérez Rosales national parks, the walking trails surrounding Osorno volcano, Lake Llanquihue (pronounced “yahn-KEE-way”) and its vacation villages, and the wildlife-rich Reloncaví fjord – all day trips within a 90-minute drive and hovering just north of true Patagonia.
A tip when assessing a destination’s soft-adventure potential: Filter for harmless mammals. Across Chile’s lakes, which sit at approximately the same latitude as Wellington, New Zealand, species such as one of the world’s tiniest marsupials (the monito del monte) and its smallest deer (the pudu) thrive. I like my chances.
While it’s on the activities menu, I didn’t come to northern Patagonia to summit a volcano. Instead, it’s enough to take in the conical, snowcapped Osorno, pisco sour in hand, from the dock at Hotel Awa. The glass-and-concrete lodge is perfectly positioned so that its 25 guest rooms – plus a dock bar, lobby living area, spa pool, and restaurant – face Lake Llanquihue and Osorno rising behind it.
When the Santiago-based Fuentes Hernández family bought this wooded property in 2005, they slated it for a private summer cabin. A decade later, they built a brutalist hotel next door. “My parents’ inspiration came from the small châteaus and paradores in rural France and Spain,” says Mauricio Fuentes, Hotel Awa’s general manager.
Fuentes and his sister, Jimena, have visited the region since they were born. Now they’ve brought their parents’ design and hospitality vision to life. Ceramic steins, oil lamps, and one Olympia typewriter turn the hotel lounge into an analog setting. Guest rooms soften beneath hide rugs, leather chests, and handloomed textiles. The staff supply travelers with foldout paper maps to plan each day’s adventure with Awa’s guides, place Pablo Neruda poems bedside at turndown, and light in-room fireplaces on cold nights. From my bed, I can see the volcano tuck in at twilight and wake up to it unmoved and reassuring the next morning.
One group of fellow travelers leaves before dawn to climb to the top of Osorno – crampons, ice axes, and helmets in tow. But I’m up at a more reasonable eight o’clock for coffee on the dock and a slow breakfast before starting the day’s excursion.
After crossing the Petrohué bridge 30 miles southeast, where the Petrohué River and Reloncaví Estuary converge, I put a kayak in at Cochamó, another ten miles south, and paddle back up the fjord with the help of a rising tide and an Awa guide. Along the way, sea lions sun themselves and chitchat from atop fishery buoys; a pod of toninas (Chilean dolphins) passes by, arching and diving in pairs. My destination after the light workout: a cascade of mountain hot springs, for soaking, and a lunch of choritos (Chilean mussels) in steaming broth. This is the optimal pace of a Lake District vacation.
The landscape here isn’t just forgiving – it’s abundant. Along the fjord, a small fishing collective harvests purple crabs, conger eels, and locos (Chilean abalone), supplying Awa and other local restaurants. Divers swim 130 feet below the surface to retrieve black-bordered oysters, and the hotel’s chefs, Mathieu Michel and Felipe Maturana Ortiz, shuck them on the spot for shooting on the dock or at the small neighborhood beach.
By this time in late spring, wildflowers and snowflake-shaped lichen carpet southern Chile. Soon luma trees (Chilean myrtle) will scent the hillsides, followed by the ulmo’s magnolia-like flowers; during the late-summer bloom, bees pollinate them to produce honey with notes of mint and jasmine.
Come fall, chefs will pick carmine murta berries to make syrups and jams. The local vintner, Claudio López Klocker, harvests gewürztraminer, then pinot noir, then malbec, and uses the traditional Champagne method to ferment fine-bubbled blanc de blancs and brut rosé. At Awa, the staff manage a year-round greenhouse, growing root vegetables, lettuces, and herbs. Guests can help collect eggs from the hen house or stroll through rows of poppies and peonies in the garden.
The lakes, with their wet winters and riotous summers, have always been symbolic, Fuentes says. He was just a toddler when his parents drove the family from Puerto Montt down the length of Route 7, the Carretera Austral (Southern Highway). The then-nascent road starts just south of Puerto Varas, extending for more than 750 miles through Patagonia’s wilderness. “The Lake District is the gateway to the Carretera Austral, often considered the country’s last frontier and a bucket-list road trip,” he says.
The route offers a corresponding string of 17 national parks, ten of them (and counting) established or expanded by conservationists Doug and Kristine Tompkins. Chile’s newest national park, Cape Froward, opened at the continent’s southernmost point this year, while its oldest, Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park, marks its centenary in 2026, a few miles east of Lake Llanquihue.
In a way, the Lake District has grown up alongside the Fuentes Hernández family. Since their first Southern Highway road trip, the nonprofit Tompkins Conservation (now Rewilding Chile) established a permanent address in Puerto Varas. And the dirt road encircling Lake Llanquihue was paved, connecting Puerto Varas to the towns of Frutillar, Puerto Octay, and Ensenada.
When the pandemic sent city dwellers searching for clean air and open spaces, Llanquihue, in particular, provided a popular soft-landing pad. “The main transformation has been in the cities, especially Puerto Varas,” Fuentes says, where the population has roughly doubled to 50,000 in the last ten years. “While some people are critical of this growth, it’s still a beautiful and relatively calm place. Around the lake, the essence is still very much intact.”
North Face and Patagonia stores anchor downtown Puerto Varas, alongside designer shops such as Francisca Ferrari and Patagonia-based Karün eyewear. Café Mawen doubles as a jewelry boutique and wine bodega. Artesanías de Chile, a national fair-trade collective, sells a selection of handwoven baskets, textiles, and pottery by more than 2,000 artisans.
One of them, María Glady Cabero Huenante, works with Artesanías to sell raw sheep’s wool by the kilo to fellow weavers. From her home workshop in Lenca, an hour’s drive south of Puerto Varas, she spins yarn on a floor spindle and then weaves over a vertical brocade loom, her blankets and rugs in caramels and forest greens that reflect the local color palette.
These crafts and other centuries-old Indigenous Mapuche and Chilote traditions thrive alongside German, Spanish, and modern Chilean influences. Following the ring road 30 minutes north of Puerto Varas, Frutillar (population: 22,000) punches above its weight with its 1,200-seat Teatro del Lago, opened in 2010 as a concert hall hosting Chilean and international acts and the annual summer Musical Weeks in January. It’s earned the town UNESCO City of Music billing, in a setting that reinforces the spectacle. Flower boxes frame stately wood-shingled houses, and murta-berry pies cool in the windows of neighborhood bakeries. From the vantage of the Teatro’s amphitheater, three volcanoes appear over the lake’s eastern horizon.
The right plot and position can do wonders. Occasionally, in this corner of the world, you’ll still witness a celebratory minga – the Chilote practice of moving a house to more fertile or auspicious ground. The community event requires a team of oxen and log rollers on land, and a sizable wooden raft pulled by a tugboat. This tradition has me thinking about travel that’s slower still – I wouldn’t even have to leave home. Sipping maté behind a picture window, surveying the landscape until a particular view stopped me in my tracks, I could get used to the moving stillness.
How to Visit Chile’s Lake District
Hotel Awa
Hotel Awa’s 25 glass-and-wood guest rooms overlook Lake Llanquihue and the Osorno volcano and serve as a prime base for pisco sour classes at the dock bar, stand-up paddleboarding from the pebble beach, and flightseeing over the crater. Book a table at Awa Restaurant around sunset for king crab gratin and conger-and-potato stew, with nature’s show on view. Virtuoso travelers receive breakfast daily and one 50-minute massage for two.
Avanti Destinations
Cross Argentina’s Lake District into Chile’s during Avanti Destinations’ three-day journey from Bariloche to Puerto Varas. Start by cruising Lake Nahuel Huapi by catamaran, then boat across Lake Frías before driving over the Vicente Pérez Rosales pass. For the grand finale, tour Lake Todos Los Santos’ emerald waters and spot at least two volcanoes – Puntiagudo and Osorno – beyond it. Departures: Any day through December 31, 2026.
Backroads
During Backroads’ seven-day Pucón-to-Puerto Varas tour, active travelers choose from daily rainforest hikes, river rafting, and cycling along Lake Ranco or Llanquihue’s shores. Culture seekers learn to make Mapuche sopaipillas and sit down to asado (grilled meats) at a backcountry quincho, a traditional open-air barbecue. Departures: Multiple dates December 22, 2026, through December 29, 2027. (Note: Nine Muses Travel receive extra amenities with Backroads!)
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