Patagonia

About Patagonia

Patagonia is defined by wind. The Andes strip moisture from the westerlies, leaving temperate rainforest on the Chilean side and a dry, cold, relentlessly windswept steppe on the Argentine one, and the contrast across a short distance is severe. The steppe supports guanaco, rheas, armadillos and pumas at low densities across very large areas. The coast is the other half of the picture: the South Atlantic shelf is highly productive, and the shoreline holds enormous breeding colonies of penguins, sea lions, elephant seals and, in the gulfs of the Valdés Peninsula, southern right whales that come in to calve. Sheep grazing has been the dominant land use for a century and has degraded large areas of steppe, and there is now substantial rewilding work underway.