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Another more recent explanation for the origins of the word Patagonia is that it comes from a 16th-century Spanish romance, Primaleón of Greece, in which the hero encounters a race of ‘savages’, who ate raw flesh and clothed themselves in animal skins (as did the native population encountered by Pigafetta), including a creature called Patagon, described as strange and misshapen, with ‘the face of a dog’ and ‘teeth sharpe and big’ – in other words, all those things the ‘civilized’ explorer might have expected to encounter in a race of ‘savages’ at the uttermost ends of the Earth.

Geography and geology

Chile’s 4300km-long, stringbean shape encompasses an enormous variety of scenery (not to mention climates), from the parched salt pans and blistering heat of the Atacama desert in the north to the splintered fjords, fractured glaciers and frigid wilds of its far south. Its highly indented coastline runs to over 6400km in length, yet the country is on average only some 175km wide. Far off its coast in the waters of the Pacific, its territory includes the Juan Fernández Archipelago and the ever mysterious Rapa Nui or Easter Island – the latter separated from the Chilean mainland by over 3800km of uninterrupted ocean.