Читать книгу Torres del Paine. Chile's Premier National Park and Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park онлайн

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The first European to see and describe Torres del Paine was Lady Florence Dixie who, bored with England, passed this way on horseback in the 1870s, and described the region in her book Across Patagonia (1880): ‘Beyond the hills rose the three red peaks and the Cordilleras. Their white glaciers, with the white clouds resting on them, were all mirrored to marvellous perfection in the motionless lake, whose crystal waters were of the most extraordinarily brilliant blue I have ever beheld.’ Baquedano Santiago Zamora, Tomás Rogers and Carl Skottsberg all visited the area during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The great Swedish explorer Otto Nordenskjöld visited the area in the 1920s, followed in the 1930s–40s by the Silesian priest and mountaineer Alberto de Agostini – hence the names Lago Nordeskjöld and Torre di Agostini.

A cattle ranch was established in Torres del Paine in 1896, running until the 1970s, and a large area of the national park on the eastern side still lies on private land. Part of the area was declared a national park in 1959 (although not before large tracts had been cleared for livestock), this being enlarged over the following years until reaching its present size of over 240,000 hectares. It was declared a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve in 1978.