Puyehue

Puyehue National Park was created in 1941 in the Los Lagos region, beside the Argentine border, and protects some 1,070 km². It is one of the oldest Chilean national parks and one of the most visited in the south of the country.

Its vegetation is Valdivian rainforest in its fullest expression: evergreen temperate rainforest of coigüe, ulmo, tepa and mañío, with a dense understorey of quila, ferns and epiphytes, and rainfall exceeding four thousand millimetres a year in some sectors. It is one of the few temperate rainforests in the southern hemisphere and holds a flora with an extremely high proportion of endemic genera, a legacy of its isolation since the break-up of Gondwana.

The landscape is dominated by the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcanic complex, whose eruption in June 2011 covered much of the park and of Argentine Patagonia in ash and disrupted air traffic across the southern hemisphere for weeks. On its slopes there are hot springs, waterfalls and recent lava fields. The fauna includes pudú, monito del monte, puma and birds endemic to the Valdivian forest such as the hued-hued and the chucao. Puyehue forms part of the Temperate Rainforests of the Austral Andes Biosphere Reserve, declared by UNESCO in 2007.