How to save a pristine valley
As the helicopter lifted off and disappeared into the clouds, the roar of the whirring blades fell away and all that was left was the sound of the rain.
I just had been deposited deep inside Cochamó Valley, a remote cathedral of towering granite in central Chile that was at the center of a decade-long conservation battle.
I wanted to see this land for myself and hear firsthand from the people who had saved it. Now, I had to hike out.
My guide was a local activist named Rodrigo Condeza. An avid backcountry camper, Condeza started a nonprofit organization called Puelo Patagonia in 2013. His goal was to stop a proposed hydroelectric power plant in the area, a project that would have entailed the construction of roads, transmission lines and electric generation facilities.
On the other side of the fight was Roberto Hagemann, a wealthy Chilean industrialist who had spent years acquiring property rights from 200 local families to assemble a 325,000-acre (or roughly 500 square mile) property. Hagemann’s plan to develop the land would have disrupted a sensitive ecological corridor and, in the minds of environmentalists, spoiled one of the wildest places in South America.
In a separate article that we just published, I tell the unlikely story of how the two sides battled each other for a decade before ultimately reaching a surprising resolution: Hagemann has agreed to sell the land to Condeza’s group for $63 million.