Destination Patagonia: A luxury travel guide to the wild South American region for food lovers

Although technically north of (mutable and disputed) Patagonian territory, no food-lover visiting Chile can miss the spectacular Isla Grande de Chiloé.

South America’s fourth-largest island, the agricultural and marine abundance of the Chiloé archipelago attracted nomadic Indigenous groups including the Chono, Huilliche and Cunco peoples, 16th-century Spanish conquistadores, Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries, shipwrecked sailors – and today it has a robust creative and culinary community, peopled by professionals who moved south from Santiago for a more bucolic existence – picture a Chilean Tasmania and you’ll be close.

This Pacific island is famed for its ancient Indigenous seafaring culture, colourful stilted palafito fishermen’s cottages, UNESCO-protected wooden baroque-style Jesuit and Franciscan churches…and as the kitchen garden of Chile.

Our base, Tierra Chiloé, was founded by the Chilean Purcell family and is now owned by Australia-based Baillie Lodges, a staggeringly beautiful 24-bedroom architectural wonder inspired by traditional palafito, stilted fishermen’s houses. Every bedroom, plus the spa and the vast living area, overlook green pastures and wildlife-rich wetlands.

To get our bearings, we take to the skies in a sea plane, for views of this almost supernaturally fertile island’s pastureland, seal colonies and fisheries. In 2012 the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization declared Chiloé a “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System”, and over the past decade, efforts have been made to celebrate and preserve the island’s culinary heritage and riches.

Where to eat on Chiloé Island

On our first night, we’re welcomed with a Mapuche curanto, similar to a Māori  Hangi in that shellfish, meat, potatoes and milcao (potato pancakes) are cooked using heated rocks in an earth oven covered with pangue leaves and turf. The all-inclusive rate includes trips around the island in the hotel’s Williche barge to visit the UNESCO-protected churches and horse-riding in the wetlands. But the highlight is a culinary tour of the island.

We visit the local Feria Campesina food market in Castro to see crates of sea urchin, strips of seaweed, sticky sweet pastries baked in kitchens across the island. We tour female-farmed organic small holdings and meet beekeeping families who win international awards for their Ulmo honey (Patagonia’s answer to manuka honey).

This epicurean island has 400 native varieties of potato alone, a staggering array noted by Charles Darwin when he visited on board the HMS Beagle in 1834. For modern-day epicurean explorers, Chiloé is truly unmissable territory.

From Chiloé, we travel to one of Patagonia’s most iconic sights, and hikes: the triple-pronged Torres del Paine. Once again, the architectural-award- scooping Tierra hotel spectacularly showcases the surrounding scenery; every guest I chat to has had this hotel on their wishlist for years.

To help us adjust to perhaps the most spectacular hotel views in Patagonia, we’re welcomed with a trio of pisco sours, the Chileno national drink made with grape brandy pisco, lemon, sugar and egg white. One is pink-hued and flavoured with the native calafate berry, deeply rooted in folklore, a nutritional powerhouse that sustained the intrepid adventures of the Mapuche, Tehuelche, Selk’nam Indigenous groups. A bit of folklore is a dangerous ingredient in a cocktail, it makes sipping this potent elixir feel almost reverential.

Adventurous things to do in Torres del Paine

The three Tierra “adventure hotels” (the third is in the Atacama Desert) were designed with reverence in mind, to display Chile’s most ravishing natural wonders, perfectly executed ancestral cuisine and people doing cool things in the vicinity. Chiloé is the cultural and culinary hotspot, but Tierra Patagonia is a paradise for luxury-loving adventurers, where days hiking and horseriding are rounded off by meals and cocktails in one of the most beautiful hotels in the world.

We hike to the frozen lake of the Torres and picnic on the rocks. We see gangly guanacos – native camelid similar to llamas but more adorable – both in the wild and in carpaccio form on the dinner menu. And we become familiar with Chilean red wines over dishes like Patagonian trout, wild forest mushroom pies and grilled lamb. The southern Patagonian varieties are more reminiscent of European wines than the more robust wines made in the northern regions of Chile and Argentina, and sipping cabernet sauvignon while watching pink hues gather on the snowy peaks of the Torres del Paine is a travel moment I’ll savour forever.

Chile and Argentina are not the best of friends, but they share Patagonia, and travelling by road over the mountains from Torres del Paine National Park in Chile to El Calafate in the Santa Cruz province of Argentina is a border adventure we relish, giving us time to absorb the sights and flavours of the past few days. El Calafate is famed as the gateway town for visiting the Perito Moreno Glacier, which attracts more than half a million visitors a year and has deservedly dominated postcards of Patagonia for decades.

Off the beaten track: Staying at Estancia Cristina

But this is a landscape to linger in, so we’ve booked three nights at one of the most historically fascinating – and geographically isolated – hotels in Argentina, a remote and historic sheep station called Estancia Cristina, founded in 1914 by English migrants, the Masters family. Located in the vast and rugged Patagonian wilderness, the only way to get here is by boat – a ravishing trip across the eerily azure waters of Lago Argentino, dotted with icebergs calving off of the many glaciers spilling into the lake.

Sheep farmers were this region’s first non-Indigenous settlers, and sheep farms such as Estancia Cristina formed the economic backbone of 20th-century Patagonia.

Today, visitors come to tear around in 4x4s to viewpoints overlooking the Upsala Glacier, hike, and horseback ride with a team of gauchos through some of the most varied scenery I’ve ever seen in a single afternoon. Back at the lodge, we dine on grilled lamb and organic greens, with ruby-hued malbec in front of roaring fires. Unlike the rest of Argentina, where pampas-raised beef rules supreme, in Patagonia, lamb is both a delicacy and a heritage.

Argentinian Patagonia is not short of luxury lodges, but for travellers seeking stories, there is heritage alongside spectacular scenery and sumptuous interior design. From a sheep station, we travel to Trelew, and onwards to the eastern coast, to sleep at a former seaweed station. Remote, unique and presenting a radical new form of barefoot luxury, Bahía Bustamante is a former seaweed farming village, complete with industrial buildings, workers cottages and a community church.

The station is set in an extraordinarily biodiverse region that the owners – Matías Soriano and Astrid Perkins – are dedicated to conserving. Soriano’s grandfather established the seaweed farm, and today, Soriano and Perkins (a journalist) are passionate about keeping this important chapter of industrial heritage alive, while continuing to innovate and experiment with the agricultural possibilities of this unique place.

Farm-to-table dining at Bahía Bustamante

Already, the majority (60 per cent) of the fruits and vegetables served in the restaurant are grown in the lodge’s biodynamic vegetable garden and from surrounding farms. But most thrillingly, they are currently growing 4000 vines as part of a project to produce the first coastal-grown wine in Argentina; visit next season to be the first to sample it.

Dazzling as these culinary innovations are, it’s the combination of epicurean delights and life-affirming wildlife adventures that has put Bahía Bustamante back on the map. On our final morning, we take a boat trip out to the Magellan penguin colony, for coffee and freshly baked croissants with penguins. The pastries are baked by a brilliant young baker, Laura, originally from the region but recently returned after mastering her craft (and getting bored of the big city) in Buenos Aires.

When I asked her why she’d returned, we both laughed, because as I glanced out the window, she didn’t have to explain. Eating her fresh pastries in the presence of penguins, reflecting on the vineyard vision of Perkins and Soriano, I realise I’ve only just begun to discover what Patagonia has to offer. But breakfast with the penguins is a very good start.