MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

US environmentalist donates 15.000 hectares of pristine Patagonia land for a national park

Douglas and Kris have chosen to live in Patagonia, where they vast tracks of land in Chile and Argentina

US millionaire and environmentalist Douglas Tompkins who has dedicated his life to promoting the beauty and wildlife of Patagonia will be donating one of his several estancias of pristine land to the Perito Moreno National Park in the extreme south of Argentina.

El Rincon with its 15.000 hectares is to the north of the world famous Perito Moreno glacier and includes among other landmarks the Cerro San Lorenzo considered a mountain representative of the Andes cordillera and which is shared by Argentina and Chile.

San Lorenzo with its impressive almost perpendicular granite wall is one of the great Andes challenges for climbers. With the pyramidal summit covered in permanent ice it is also known as the Argentine Everest, and with the Tompkins donation will become an entirely protected area in one of Argentina’s national wilderness parks.

Tompkins and his wife Kris bought El Rincon back in 1992 and they describe the area as “the best place in the world” to live. They have donated land both in Argentina and neighbouring Chile and from Argentina operate with the foundation “The Conservation Land Trust” and “Patagonia Conservation”.

This will be the Tompkins third land donation in Argentina for national parks, the first was Piñalito in the northern state of Misiones next to Brazil and Paraguay; the second the Estancia Monte León which became the Monte León National Park, and now El Rincon.

The formal ceremony is scheduled for Thursday in a Buenos Aires hotel with the attendance of the Argentine Minister of Tourism and the heads of the National Parks administration.

In Chile Tompkins has also donated land for national parks and his campaigning prevented the logging of lenga forests, a slow-growing hard-wood tree that grows in wind swept Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.