Pampering on the high Pampas

Image: Adam Clark

Tierra Patagonia Hotel & Spa

If ever you have earned a drink after a long journey, it’s at Chile’s Tierra Patagonia Hotel & Spa. From the town of Punta Arenas, you take a five-hour drive across the Pampas just to get here. Showing off its famous trio of 9,500-foot-high granite horns through the picture window, the Torres del Paine make the Adirondacks look like foothills. Cocooned next to the lounge fireplace, you’ll be ready to swap stories over a Pisco Sour made from the local dark calafate berry, to toast your triumphs in nearby Paine National Park.

Maybe the day’s excursion took you trekking past waterfalls and over glacier fields, or kayaking around massive blue ice floes on Lake Grey. Or perhaps you climbed up cliffs to see petroglyphs or tried fly-fishing on Lake Sarmiento while herds of llama-like guanacos wandered nonchalantly past you. Later in the evening, you might curl up on a sofa in the long lounge made from blond lenga wood and peruse books on the flora and fauna in this world biosphere reserve. You can look forward to the next day’s horseback ride and wood-fire lamb roast at a nearby hacienda. Or you can retire to Tierra Patagonia’s Uma Spa, where the pool shares the same panoramic view of those Torres. And as the condors soar in the sky, you are reminded that even a trip to the spa can provide an adventure.