Patagonia: journey to the end of the world

At the southern end of the Americas, where the continent frays into islands and channels before giving way to the Southern Ocean, lies Patagonia — a vast, wild and sparsely populated land of jagged peaks, immense glaciers, windswept steppe and a sense of standing at the very end of the world.

Straddling Chile and Argentina, Patagonia is a place of superlatives. In Chile's Torres del Paine National Park, granite towers rise above turquoise lakes, drawing trekkers to one of the planet's great hiking circuits. In Argentina, the colossal Perito Moreno Glacier calves great slabs of ice into a milky lake with a sound like thunder, while the spires around El Chaltén lure climbers and walkers.

The scale is humbling and the weather famously fierce, with winds that can knock a person off balance and skies that change in minutes. This is not a destination for the faint-hearted, but the rewards — condors wheeling overhead, guanacos grazing the steppe, glaciers glowing blue — are extraordinary.

Getting there takes effort and time, and distances are vast. But that remoteness is central to the appeal, a feeling of having travelled to the far edge of the inhabited world.

For those drawn to raw nature and big landscapes, Patagonia stirs something deep. It is a place that makes travellers feel small in the best possible way, dwarfed by ice, rock and sky at the bottom of the world.