Los Lagos
in Patagonia

The lake district of southern Chile is one of those landscapes that makes the word scenic feel entirely inadequate. Perfectly conical volcanoes rise above deep glacial lakes, araucaria forests cover the hillsides in something that looks prehistoric, and the rain, when it comes, only makes the green more intense. Puerto Varas is the most handsome base, a lakeside town with a Germanic architectural inheritance left by nineteenth-century settlers whose influence runs through the smoked meats, the dark bread, and the kuchen served in wooden houses overlooking Lago Llanquihue. The island of Chiloé to the south operates on its own slower logic entirely, with stilt churches, wooden palafitos, and a mythology so specific and strange it has its own UNESCO recognition. Come with waterproofs and no fixed schedule.