Patagonia's Last Wild Horses: The Baguales of the Southern Steppe

In the mid-1530s the Spanish expedition of Pedro de Mendoza shipped Andalusian horses from Cádiz to the estuary of the Río de la Plata, where Mendoza founded the first Buenos Aires. The settlement did not last. Attacks by local peoples and hunger forced the colonists out around 1540, and somewhere between a dozen and 45 horses were left behind.

The pampas suited them perfectly. When Buenos Aires was refounded in 1580, the feral herds on the surrounding grassland were estimated at around 12,000 animals. Over the next two centuries horses spread across the plains and south into Patagonia, and the Indigenous peoples of the south, among them the Aónikenk or southern Tehuelche, became accomplished riders who hunted guanaco and rhea on horseback.

Later waves of horses came with the sheep ranches of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Estancias in the Magallanes region of Chile and in Argentine Santa Cruz kept large numbers of working horses, and some escaped or were turned out on remote ground. Their descendants joined the older bloodlines, which is why the Patagonian baguales today vary so much in size and colour: bays, greys, duns, chestnuts and the occasional pinto in the same band.

Centuries of breeding without human selection made them hardy. The same is true of the Criollo, the ranch breed that descends from the same Spanish stock and is known for living on poor grazing and coping with heat and cold alike.

The toughness of these horses has one famous demonstration. In 1925 the Swiss-born teacher Aimé Tschiffely left Buenos Aires with two Criollo geldings, Mancha and Gato, then aged 16 and 15, and rode north. Three years and about 21,500 kilometres later he arrived in New York, having crossed the Andes, the deserts of Peru and the length of Central America. Both horses were later shipped home to Argentina. Gato lived to 36, Mancha to 40.

North-east of Torres del Paine, a range of mountains runs for about 60 kilometres along the border between Chile and Argentina. Settlers who arrived in the area found so many feral horses roaming its valleys that they named it Sierra Baguales. Before them, the Aónikenk called the range Karhuern.

The country here is open, dry steppe broken by ridges and flat-topped hills, about 120 kilometres north of Puerto Natales. Most of the land belongs to private estancias, and visits are arranged through them or through guides in Puerto Natales. That privacy is part of the reason the horses have survived: few roads cross the range, and the herds see few people.

Light behaves differently on the steppe than in the mountains. There are almost no trees, so there is no shade to soften midday sun, and the low ridges create long shadows only in the first and last hours. A horse silhouetted on a ridgeline at dusk is the classic picture of Sierra Baguales. It also takes hours of waiting, because the horses rarely walk where a photographer has set up.

In Chile the word bagual does not belong to horses alone. On the forested peninsulas of Última Esperanza Sound, south of Torres del Paine, it also means feral cattle, descended from ranch herds that strayed into the woods and never came back. Ranching families in the area have long sent out bagualeros, riders who track these animals through bog and forest with dogs, rope them by hand and lead them out over days.

It is slow, dangerous work, and it depends on good horses. A rider in that country may spend a week reaching ground that looks a day away on the map, and the horses carry men, saddles, food and, eventually, a roped bull. The practice has faded as ranches have been sold and turned to tourism or conservation.

The two kinds of bagual are bound together. The feral horse is the animal that escaped the ranch; the ranch horse is the one that brings the feral cattle home.

The herd most visitors can reach lives around Laguna Azul, in the north-east of the Torres del Paine area. Guides who monitor these horses describe a population of roughly a hundred, unusually gathered in one large group rather than scattered across the hills. Part of their range is private land of about 50 square kilometres, outside the routes used by trekkers on the park’s main circuits, and access is through local guides.

As introduced animals, feral horses sit awkwardly in a national park managed for native species such as guanaco, rhea and puma. Their presence has been argued over for years, between those who see them as a heritage of the region’s ranching history and those who see them as competition for native grazers. That debate is not settled. What is clear is that a single herd near the massif has become one of Torres del Paine’s less expected sights.

The horses share these slopes with some famous neighbours. Torres del Paine is one of the most reliable places in South America to see pumas, which hunt the guanaco that graze the same grassland, and Andean condors ride the updrafts along the ridges above Laguna Azul. A morning spent waiting for the herd can easily turn into a morning spent watching something else.

Nobody minds.

Photographically, Laguna Azul offers something Sierra Baguales does not: the towers of the Paine massif on the horizon. On clear mornings the granite spires catch first light across the lake, and a herd grazing on the near shore gives a composition that ties the horses to the mountains. Clouds clear and close quickly in Torres del Paine, so a plan for the mountains and a second plan for close-ups of the horses help on the same morning.

The working rules are simple. Keep at least 15 metres away, and more for stallions with mares. Approach slowly, crouch rather than stand, and let the horses decide the distance. A lens of 300 to 500 millimetres allows portraits without pressure on the herd, and a fast shutter speed is needed in the near-constant wind. You will spend most of the day waiting; that is normal.

The largest feral populations in Chilean Patagonia are farther south, in the mountains of the Cordillera Darwin on Tierra del Fuego. A 2016 account by a Chilean equine veterinarian estimated about 5,000 horses living in roughly 100 herds across more than 700,000 hectares of mountain, some of them having lived without human contact for more than a century. The horses also use the land of the former Yendegaia ranch, a 35,000-hectare estancia that reaches the Beagle Channel.

In December 2013 that ranch land became part of the new Yendegaia National Park, which covers about 150,612 hectares of mountains and temperate rainforest between the Beagle Channel and Lake Fagnano. The private portion was donated to the Chilean state by a conservation foundation of the same name. How the horses fit into a national park there is the same question asked at Torres del Paine, on a larger and more remote scale.

Few photographers reach these herds. Access is by boat along the Beagle Channel or by long tracks on foot or horseback, and the weather turns quickly. The pictures that do come out of the Cordillera Darwin show smaller, shaggier horses than those farther north, standing on wet ground with glaciers behind them.

Patagonian summer, from December to February, brings long days and the strongest winds. Late summer and autumn, from February to April, are usually better for photographing Patagonia’s wild horses: the grass turns gold, the light comes in lower, and foals born in spring are big enough to run with the band. Winter brings snow and the chance of horses standing in white fields, but days are short and many lodges and routes close.

For more on conservation in the southern half of the continent, the rewilding of Argentina’s Iberá Wetlands shows a very different approach to large animals in the country’s subtropical north-east. The glacier-cut valleys of Fiordland in New Zealand share the same southern weather and the same short windows of clear sky. Horses of a more organised kind take centre stage at the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo in Wyoming. More picture-led features are collected in the photography section.

Pack a lens cloth and a spare. Fine dust and rain often arrive in the same hour on the steppe, and the wind drives both straight at the front element.