In November 2025, Emma and I completed the Dientes de Navarino walking circuit in Southern Chile over five days. It’s a great route with the real ‘end-of-the-world’ feel, though it is certainly becoming more popular. I have a few notes here for anyone considering the route themselves:
- Many parties we met in Puerto Williams were completing the route in three days but we did it in five. This was a common theme throughout our time in Patagonia of many parties being in a rush to complete routes and doing long hours of walking. Maybe it is a British thing to want time for a cup of tea and bowl of porridge in the morning.
- Much is made of the isolation of the route, and while it is certainly true (at its further point you are two days walk from civilisation) we had two parties completing the route the same time we were, which certainly didn’t detract from the feeling of isolaton but provided a slight safety net in case of major injury.
- I think we had unseasonably good weather, but for us it never got anywhere near as bad as it was made out to be. Certainly, we had more brutal conditions in Scotland in September for instance.
- Navigation, similarly, wasn’t as bad as I had been led to believe. Indeed, for the first three days it’s really rather good, with a series of physical markers with location codes printed on them corresponding to marks on the official Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales. In the last two days, travelling through the wooded section, a GPS does become essential, and I can see how in bad weather it could be quite an arduous task.
- There’s quite a few mapping options for this route, we purchased the “Andes Profundo” map, widely available in Puntas Arenas, which was adequate. However, the best option is Kanaska Maps, an individual passion project for mapping the Isla Navarino and its trails. A visit to the Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales, in Punta Arenas, is also very useful, where they can provide you with a paper leaflet with their map on complete with the aforementioned marker codes. They also have a pdf copy of their official guidebook, all in Spanish, which makes for some interesting reading … in every sense of the word. It it supposed to be available on their website but I could not get this to work, so the kindly ministry workers forward me a pdf copy.
- Puerto Williams is certainly not a big town, but the supermarkets are adequate and there is a very good museum there on the indigenous Yaghan culture. I would not, however, recommend staying at the El Padrino campsite. It’s 20 000 CLP (~ £20) per person per night for an uncleaned kitchen, cold showers and a conveniently absent host until it was time to pay up. My advice would be to do a bit of forward planning to minimise your down days in Puerto Williams to save the expense of accommodation and wild camp a bit out of town.
- We took the 32-hour TABSA ferry to reach Puerto Williams from Punta Arenas and then flew back with DAP airlines. I would recommend this way around because then you get to experience passing through the Beagle Channel during daylight hours which is quite the experience. The food onboard, however, is god-awful, and I’m not generally one to have much to criticise on food. For reasons I can’t quite fathom, the ferry arrives in Puerto Williams at the very sociable hour of midnight, so you are unlikely to be getting much use of any accommodation you are paying for that night anyway, so wild camping should be a consideration.
- The DAP plane flights tend to book around a week in advance, we booked our flights as soon as we landed on Navarino, but in retrospect we should have booked earlier. There was a bit of uncertainty around our bag weights and DAP’s more restrictive limits (10kg), but in our experience this proved not to be an issue. That said, the Paramo jacket once again earned its keep by storing four paperbacks in the pockets!
Below are a few photographs I took during the trip. If you’re reading this and would like to get in contact to discuss the route further, or want any resources, gpx files etc., you can do so here.
