Two national parks have been formally dedicated in Chile, marking a pledge made early last year to create five new national parks in the country while expanding the boundaries of three others.
On Monday, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, president and CEO of Tompkins Conservation, signed the decrees creating Pumalín National Park and Patagonia National Park. The one million acres and world-class infrastructure they contain have been billed as the largest donation of land from a private entity to a country.
Together, they are adding a total of more than 10 million acres of national parklands to Chile, with one million acres of land from Tompkins Conservation and an additional 9 million acres of federal land from Chile. For scale, that is more than three times the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone combined, or approximately the size of the country of Switzerland, according to Tompkins Conservation.
Pumalín Park and Patagonia Park were pieced together by Tompkins Conservation under the guidance of the late Doug Tompkins and his wife, Kristine.
"Today on this windy summer day, we gather at Patagonia Park to complete the last of this historic 10 million acre national park expansion for Chile," Ms. Tompkins wrote in an email announcing the achievement. "This moment will be bittersweet, as our Patagonia Park will no longer be ours, but will belong to all Chileans and will remain open to all visitors, as we intended. And most importantly, it will belong forever to all the huemuls, guanacos, condors and other creatures that call this park their home."
“With these beautiful lands, their forests, their rich ecosystems, we…expand the network of parks to more than 10 million acres. Thus, national parklands in Chile will increase by 38.5 percent to account for 81.1 percent of Chile’s protected areas," said President Bachelet.
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