Things to do
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Bosque Encantado
A scramble up a side valley south of the Queulat pass, through moss hung forest to a milky green lagoon sitting under a glacier. The trail is short but wet and rooted, involves river crossings that rise after rain, and runs about three hours return with real care needed near the top.
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Casa Ludwig
A tall shingled house on the shore road, built in the 1940s by one of the German founders of the village and the clearest surviving piece of that settlement. It works as a guesthouse now, keeps a small display of photographs and papers from the colony's first decades, and opens in season only.
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Lago Risopatrón
A narrow lake about thirteen kilometres north of the village, its water dark with tannin and its shore stacked with drowned trunks. A CONAF campground and a short interpretive trail sit at the southern end, and the surface is usually calm enough to paddle early in the day.
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Puyuhuapi Lodge & Spa
The lodge stands alone on the far shore of the fjord and is reached only by its own launch from a jetty on the Carretera Austral, which runs to a timetable. Three thermal pools face the water, the building is timber throughout, and the crossing stops it from reading as a roadside hotel.
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Park
Queulat National Park
Some 154,000 hectares of Valdivian rainforest, ice cap and fjord straddling the Carretera Austral, with rainfall over four metres a year in places and moss on anything that stands still. Its trails start from three separate accesses off the road, all of them gravel, and CONAF holds a fixed daily opening window.
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Salto Padre García
A waterfall named for the Jesuit who came up this coast in the 1760s searching for the City of the Caesars, reached by a path of a few minutes from a pullout on the Carretera Austral. It drops into a narrow rock chute south of the Queulat pass and is the shortest stop in the park.
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Termas del Ventisquero
Hot pools terraced down to the edge of the Puyuhuapi fjord about six kilometres south of the village, with the tide a few metres from the water. This one is on the road and needs no boat, entry is timed, and booking ahead through the summer months is worth doing.
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Ventisquero Colgante
A glacier hangs in a cirque above the Ventisquero valley and sends its meltwater down in two falls straight into the lagoon below it. The trail from the CONAF post crosses the river on a suspension bridge and climbs about three kilometres through forest to the viewpoint, roughly three hours in and out.