Isla Tenglo

Isla Tenglo sits so close to Puerto Montt that from the mainland waterfront it barely registers as its own place — more like a green hump across a narrow channel than an island with its own identity. That changes the moment you’re actually on the little wooden boat crossing over, an outboard-powered launch that costs almost nothing and takes about five minutes, long enough to watch the port city recede into something soft and distant rather than the fairly workaday town it is up close. I went on a recommendation from a hostel owner who said, simply, “you have to eat curanto there,” and refused to elaborate further.

She was right to refuse to elaborate. Curanto al hoyo — the traditional Chiloé and northern Patagonian method of cooking shellfish, meat, potatoes, and milcao bread in a pit dug into the earth, layered over hot stones and covered with nalca leaves — is prepared on Isla Tenglo by families who’ve been doing it the same way for generations, and eating it on plastic chairs at a waterside table, steam still rising off the pit, with Puerto Montt visible across the channel, felt like being handed the real version of something I’d only had a diluted version of elsewhere.

Beyond the curanto shacks near the landing, the island is mostly quiet residential lanes and small farms, with a walking loop that takes you around the shoreline in a couple of unhurried hours. I walked it in the late afternoon, past chickens loose in yards and fishing nets drying on fences, with occasional gaps in the trees giving views back toward Puerto Montt’s cathedral and the Andes rising behind it — a genuinely strange sensation, seeing a city from a rural island that’s technically inside its limits.

When to go: Any day trip works, but go around lunchtime specifically for curanto, which some families only prepare on weekends or by prior arrangement — ask at the boat landing or through your Puerto Montt accommodation a day ahead.