Pucatrihue, Pacific Coast — Southern Chile
Sometimes I just need to be beside the ocean.
I grew up by the sea. Summer meant sandy feet and sunburnt shoulders, learning the rhythm of the tides, reading the waves, collecting shells along the shore. The sound of water breaking over rock. Seaweed lifting and folding in the foam as currents pulled it back and forth. The sharp salt in the air. Long walks that cleared the mind, and falling asleep to the steady pulse of surf.
I have missed it.
Living beside a vast lake is beautiful — Lago Llanquihue is magnificent — but the ocean is something else entirely. It’s in my bones.
So this summer we went to Pucatrihue, a small hamlet on Chile’s southern Pacific coast. I had always wanted to visit, knowing the coastline here offered white sandy beaches rather than the volcanic, pebbled shorelines that surround the great lakes. Here, the Valdivian rainforest slopes down to wide, untamed beaches, where small Patagonian dolphins appear offshore, sometimes leaping through the surf. Our host told us they are most active just before rain.
And of course, it did rain.
The weather was typical of a Patagonian summer — warm rain, shifting skies, long stretches of cloud. Perfect weather, if you ask me, for a stormy horizon and a quiet cup of coffee.
There was no internet. And my teenage children survived.
They were up before me each morning, binoculars in hand, scanning the horizon for dolphins and eager to head out along the beach or scramble over the rocks, fascinated by the enormous waves stirred up by the stormy weather.
They didn’t grow up by the sea, and I always enjoy watching their reaction to it. The ocean captivates them. It is never still, never the same twice — loud, restless, and full of life. At times it is even a little intimidating.
We followed the coastline from Pucatrihue toward Maicolpué, Tril-Tril, and Caleta El Manzano, beaches that lie within ancestral Indigenous territory, their names still carrying the memory of the land. Surfers dotted the break, and there was even a small surf school. Still, the place felt wonderfully remote — no petrol station, no large supermarket, no pharmacies.
A small piece of advice: when travelling in Patagonia, research ahead and pack accordingly.
This part of the coast feels far from everything. Yet it’s only two or three hours from Puerto Varas or Puerto Montt, with Osorno about sixty kilometres away.
A windswept edge of the Pacific where rainforest meets the sea.
Here, the continent simply ends — and the Pacific begins.
Stay at Casita Cielo, Pucatrihue.