Puerto Varas Branches Out

Logging baron switches sides--and takes a town with him.

NELSON GARCIA WAS DESTINED TO BE A LOGGING BARON. HIS family holds title to thousands of acres of old-growth forest and his father made a fortune converting 2,000-year-oldalerce trees into the telephone poles that line roads throughout Chile. So well known is the family business, in fact, that the Garcia name is synonymous with alerce logging.

In an ironic twist, however, the man who should by all rights be chopping down trees has become a poster boy for sustainable development. And he's taken a whole town's economy along with him.

In 1998, friends and family persuaded a balking Garcia to build the Alerce Mountain Lodge, an eco-inn nestled in a pristine grove two hours east of Puerto Varas. The logger-turnedhotelier hired 15 full-time employees to scour the forest floor and pick up wood chips to hide the area's tree-felling past. Then he punched out a 26-kilometer road up to an Andean mountain lake surrounded by old forests.

When asked what will happen if the lodge doesn't turn a profit within five years, Garcia grins and slices his hand like an ax. "Back to business:' he says. But that probably won't be necessary.

Reservations are pouring in and Garcia is now famous as a reformed logging baron.

The local impact of Garcia's conversion can't be overstated. During the past decade, the picturesque lakeside town of Puerto Varas saw its population double to 30,000 as it established itself as the gateway to Patagonia. Perched on a corner of Lake Llanquihue, its brightly colored Germanic houses dot the slopes leading to the lake's volcanic sand beach. Along with the snow-capped volcanoes that punctuate every view, Puerto Varas is blessed with scenery so spectacular that photos of it seem doctored.

"This has got to be Photoshop," exclaimed Lex Fautsch when he first eyed a Puerto Varas property for sale on the Internet in July 2000. Fautsch, an environmental engineer living in Luxembourg, had spent four years scouting for a home for his travel company. Within days of seeing the online images, he flew to Chile and purchased a property called La Junta, tucked into a river valley several hours east of Puerto Varas.

The land boasts its own 100-meter waterfall, trout streams and granite cliff faces that have given the spot the nickname "Chile's Yosemite Valley." Fautsch's now-booming Campo Aventura company offers horseback excursions, trekking, kayaking and trout fishing.

Fautsch isn't alone. Today an adventure traveler can stroll the 12 square blocks of Puerto Varas and choose from among a laundry list of activities. There is trout fishing on world class streams, Class V rafting or even weeklong sea kayaking trips into Chile's fjords. While chic Pucon further north boasts a higher international profile, Puerto Varas is carving out a niche in nature-based sustainable tourism.

"They thought we were crazy," says Matthias Holzmann, co-founder of adventure travel company Aquamotion, describing local residents' reaction when he arrived in Puerto Varas seven years ago. "They couldn't believe that people would pay us to take them walking."

As tourism took off, the skepticism faded. "Tourism has proven itself to be one of the great economic arms of the region," says Gerardo Niklitshak, of Al Sur, another adventure travel company. Chips and ships. Garcia's alerce forests blanket a rainy region that was already a timber center by the time German immigrants arrived in the late 1860s. So seemingly endless was the supply of broad hardwood that it covered roads in place of paving material. More than a century later, the board business was replaced by wood chip enterprises; native trees were reduced to coin-sized pieces and shipped to Japanese paper manufacturers. Throughout the 1980s, the region's symbol was the five-story pile of wood chips at the port.

As the chip business grew, however, the forest shrank. In the early 1990s, opposition to deforestation was consolidated with the arrival of Douglas Tompkins, a progressive millionaire from California. The founder of North Face outdoor gear and Esprit clothing began a campaign to stop Chilean forestry operations. Using front companies, he quietly scooped up the best river crossings and ports, suddenly making clear cutting--usually the cheapest way to harvest trees--prohibitively expensive.

After amassing a million acres of ancient forests, Tompkins opened Pumalin Park, a private wilderness area for hiking and camping. Although Chileans initially questioned his intentions, Pumalin Park has become a popular trekking spot and one of the destinations offered by Puerto Varas tour guides.

Meanwhile, Puerto Varas' growing reputation as an adventure mecca has won it comparisons to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Many of the outdoor guides from places like Boulder, Colorado, and Canada's Banff, in Alberta, travel here for work during the North American winter. "We don't make that much money in a season down here," one of them explains, "but it's so beautiful that we don't care."

COPYRIGHT 2001 Freedom Magazines, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group