Choshuenco

I drove out to Choshuenco on a whim, following the eastern shore road around Lago Panguipulli past farms and fish camps until the asphalt simply ran out and the village appeared — a scatter of houses, a general store, a black-sand beach where a few boats sat pulled up on the shingle. It’s not a destination in the conventional sense. There’s no plaza with a monument, no row of restaurants competing for your attention. What there is, is the Mocho-Choshuenco volcanic massif rising directly behind the village, twin snow-covered summits that turn pink at sunset in a way that made me stop unpacking the car and just stand there.

The village exists because of what’s above it. The Reserva Nacional Mocho-Choshuenco starts a short drive up a rough road, and in winter this becomes one of the only places in the Lake District where you can ski touring without a lift system — you climb, you ski down, you climb again, with views over Panguipulli and Neltume the whole way. In summer the same terrain turns into a long, satisfying trek to the summit, through lenga forest that gives way to volcanic scree and finally to permanent ice. I didn’t have the gear or the time to summit, and I’ve regretted it mildly ever since.

What I did instead was simpler and, in its way, just as good: I swam. The lake here is glacially cold even in January, but the black volcanic sand holds heat from the sun, and there’s a particular pleasure in lying on hot sand next to water cold enough to make you gasp. A fisherman mending nets nearby told me, in the unhurried way people talk when there’s genuinely nowhere else to be, that his grandfather had fished this same stretch of shore. Nothing about that surprised me. Choshuenco feels like a place time forgot to update.

When to go: July through September for ski touring on Mocho-Choshuenco, if you have the experience and gear. December through February for the lake, the beach, and long warm days with almost no other travelers around.