Alerce Andino National Park

Listen first. Water drips from moss onto moss. Somewhere high in the canopy a bird gives a loud, chuckling call, then goes quiet. The air is cool and wet, and it smells of soil, bark and rain that never quite stops. Underfoot the trail is soft and dark, covered in fallen leaves and roots. You are standing in one of the wettest forests on Earth, and some of the trees around you are older than most written history.

This is Alerce Andino National Park, in Llanquihue Province, in the Los Lagos region of southern Chile. It lies a short drive from the port city of Puerto Montt, where the Andes come down close to the sea. The park was created in 1982. Its main purpose is written into its name: to protect the alerce, a giant conifer of the southern Andes, and the forest community that grows around it.

So what is an alerce? Scientists call it Fitzroya cupressoides. It is a kind of cypress that grows only in a small part of southern Chile and nearby Argentina. The scientific name honours Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle, the ship that carried a young Charles Darwin along this coast in the 1830s. The local Mapuche people have their own name for the tree, lahuán, and they knew it for many generations before any European ship arrived.

Here is the first surprise. The alerce grows extremely slowly, often only a millimetre or two in width each year. Because of this, a trunk you could barely wrap your arms around may already be many centuries old. Scientists who count tree rings have found alerces that lived for more than 3,000 years. That places the alerce among the oldest living trees on the planet, alongside the bristlecone pines of North America.

That slow growth gives the wood its special qualities. Alerce timber is reddish, straight-grained and very resistant to rot. For centuries people in southern Chile split it into shingles for roofs and walls. On the island of Chiloé, to the south, you can still see old houses and churches covered in these overlapping wooden scales. The demand was enormous, and over time vast areas of alerce forest were cut down or burned.

By the twentieth century the tree was in real danger. In 1976 the Chilean state declared the alerce a Natural Monument, which made cutting living trees illegal. The protection came late, but it mattered. Parks like this one now hold some of the best remaining alerce stands. When you see a tall, straight, fibrous trunk with reddish bark rising above the other trees, you are looking at a survivor of that long history of logging.

Now look around you more widely. This is the Valdivian temperate rainforest, a rare kind of forest found in only a few places in the world. Rain falls here in almost every season, carried in from the Pacific Ocean and stopped by the mountains. The result is a forest in layers. Tall trees form the roof, smaller trees fill the middle, and ferns, mosses and climbing plants cover nearly every surface below.

The alerce shares this forest with many other native trees. There is the coihue, a tall southern beech with small glossy leaves. There is the ulmo, which covers itself in white flowers in summer and feeds local bees. Look closely at the trunks and branches. Many of them carry their own small gardens of moss, lichen and tiny ferns. Some of these plants never touch the ground at all. They live entirely on the trees.

At ground level, watch for the nalca. It is a plant with enormous, rough, umbrella-shaped leaves on thick, spiky stalks. A single leaf can be wide enough to shelter a person from the rain. Here is the second surprise: in the south of Chile, people peel and eat the young stalks, which taste sour and fresh. Please leave the plants in the park untouched, but you may see nalca stalks for sale in markets around Puerto Montt.

The park is also a landscape of water. Many small lakes lie scattered between steep, forested slopes, some of them formed by old glaciers. The best known for visitors is Laguna Sargazo, a calm, dark lake framed by forest. On a still day the water holds a perfect reflection of the hills. On a stormy day, low cloud moves across the surface, and the far shore can disappear completely within a few minutes.

Animals here are shy and hard to see, but they are present. The pudú, one of the smallest deer in the world, moves quietly through the thick undergrowth. Pumas live in the wider mountains, though visitors rarely meet one. The loud bird call you may have heard is often the chucao, a small, round, brown bird with a red chest. It hops on the forest floor and calls from close by, but it rarely shows itself.

Locals say the chucao can tell your fortune. According to an old rural tale in southern Chile, a call from your right side means good luck on your journey. A call from your left side is a warning, and some travellers would turn back. It is folklore, of course. But walking here, with that sudden voice coming out of the ferns, it is easy to understand why people listened carefully.

A visit here rewards patience more than speed. Paths can be muddy, roots are slippery, and rain can arrive with little warning. That is part of the experience. Walk slowly, and the forest starts to show smaller details: a drop of water hanging from a fern tip, a beetle on wet bark, a ribbon of mist moving between trunks. The sound of streams follows you along almost every path in the park.

Before you leave, stop for a moment and look up at the tallest trunk you can find. Think about the slow work of a tree that adds only a thin ring each year, through centuries of rain and storms. Then look down at your own wet boots on the trail. As you walk back toward the road, notice how the forest sound slowly changes: less dripping, more wind, and finally the open sky again.