It is the 1980s in Chile. At the foot of the Nevados de Sollipulli, between the Llaima and Villarrica volcanoes, some 100 kilometers east of Temuco, a forest of ancient araucarias is dying. The decree that since 1976 had protected Araucaria araucana —declared a natural monument and placed off-limits to logging— was suspended under pressure from the forestry sector, and the chainsaws returned to the forest.

 

In the early morning, the screech of chainsaws and the labored breathing of men at work tear through the silence. Startled, pudús, güiñas, pumas, chucaos, and cachañas shudder. Hundreds of araucaria trunks —adorned, like works of art, with the unmistakable geometric patterns of their bark— lie inert on the ground. Heavy trucks will force their way through the vegetation to haul them to sawmills, where they will be cut into boards and beams. In just a few hours, the hand of man undoes millennia.

 

Because what falls is no ordinary tree. The araucaria is a living fossil: its lineage has endured for nearly 200 million years, feeding dinosaurs in the Jurassic and surviving extinctions they could not. A single tree can live for more than a thousand years and reach over 40 meters in height; its hard, triangular leaves stay alive on the branch for up to two decades. As Chile’s national tree, it earned its English name —monkey puzzle— from a Victorian remark that not even a monkey could work out how to climb its spiny branches. In 2013, the IUCN raised its status to endangered, driven by the same three threats then closing in on that Sollipulli forest: logging, fire, and grazing.

 

Nor is it an ordinary tree for those who have lived in its shade since long before the chainsaws arrived. In Mapudungun, the araucaria is the pewen, and one branch of the Mapuche people names itself after it: the Pewenche, “people of the pewen.” For millennia, its seeds —piñones, or ngülliw— have been a staple food, eaten boiled or roasted, ground into flour for bread, or fermented into a beverage. The autumn harvest begins with the ngillatun, a ceremony that asks the land’s permission before gathering, and is governed by customs of respect: you do not strip every cone or empty the tree. To level a forest of araucarias, for the Pewenche, is not to cut timber —it is to fell a relative.

 

In 1990, came relief: Chile’s government reinstated the protection of the araucaria, and the logging stopped. But a new threat lay in wait. Unmanaged and unchecked, cattle ranching began to degrade the soil and vegetation, which were just beginning to recover.

 

 

“A forest that forty years ago seemed condemned is growing toward the light once more—a living fossil, again, of hope.”

 

In 1998, a score of Chilean conservationists, together with two members of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, formed the Trafampulli Society, which acquired 160 hectares of araucaria forest to preserve it. Martin Gardner —a Scottish botanist and conifer specialist with the garden’s conservation program— brought the project to the attention of the U.K.-based group Rainforest Concern.

 

After a series of conversations between Peter Bennett, the organization’s founder and executive director, Gardner, and Antonio Lara —a researcher of forest ecosystems and a defender of Chile’s native forests, also a member of the society— Rainforest Concern began, in 2002, to acquire seven neighboring properties parcel by parcel. The organization, which protects threatened habitats by buying at-risk land and putting management plans in place, has expanded the reserve ever since.

 

Today, Nasampulli Reserve spans close to 1,500 hectares —nearly tenfold its original size— and is administered by the Chilean foundation FORECOS, with funding from its English partner.

One of the first programs addressed the problem of free-roaming cattle, which eroded trails and hampered the forest’s regeneration. Marco Cortés, a doctor of forest sciences who manages the reserve today, explains that the program’s success, carried out in close partnership with the neighboring community, “led to a greater and faster rate of restoration of the native vegetation.”

 

This was followed by the planting of araucarias and lengas in degraded areas and the construction of terraces to halt erosion. The results, he says, have been swift and striking.

 

In 2012, the first camera traps went up, reinforced in 2021 with equipment donated by the English organization NatureSpy. Their footage revealed a forest richer in wildlife than expected. Enrique Cruz, FORECOS’s executive director, notes that thirteen years of monitoring have confirmed pumas, pudús, güiñas, skunks, culpeo and chilla foxes, chucaos, black-throated huet-huets, and monitos del monte —one of Chile’s four marsupials, itself a living fossil— among the reserve’s residents. The cameras also track how these species interact and how they are affected by exotic mammals such as wild boar and red deer, introduced on a neighboring property and now among the reserve’s chief threats.

 

In the night images, a puma crosses a clearing unhurried; at dawn, the rasping call of the chucao gives away a forest awake. Where chainsaws once roared, the silence is now broken by life.

 

 

 

 

In 2016, the Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR)2 established a Long-Term Study Site in the reserve. Antonio Lara —a (CR)2 researcher and president of FORECOS— explains that the work “is of great importance at a regional scale and for conservation. Alongside other stations, it lets us gauge the magnitude of climate variability and change in mountain environments.” Three automated weather stations record rainfall, temperature, humidity, snowpack, and other variables, while the flow of the Trafampulli River — which rises in the reserve and feeds Lake Caburgua — is continuously measured.

 

The most unsettling finding comes from cross-referencing those records with what researchers see on the ground. Thanks to that data, Lara says, and to the loss of vigor and the mortality recently observed in Nasampulli’s lenga forests, “we can better investigate and understand the impact of the megadrought on the reserve’s ecosystems.” That megadrought —the longest on record in central Chile— is also what makes the forest more flammable, and fire may now be the gravest danger the araucarias face. The blazes that have swept araucaria forests in the nearby China Muerta reserve and elsewhere across south-central Chile in recent years are a warning of what is at stake.

 

The reserve’s cabin, besides sheltering rangers and staff, hosts volunteers, students, and researchers each summer who pursue their theses while pitching in on reforestation and maintenance. In its guestbook, Peter Bennett wrote that returning to Nasampulli and seeing the progress of recent years left him “completely reassured” that Rainforest Concern had made the right decision, and that under Antonio’s leadership the reserve would go “from strength to strength.”

 

The plans are ambitious. Given its proximity to towns like Villarrica and Temuco and its excellent state of conservation, Cruz says the reserve “could become an important area for small-scale, special-interest tourism, both in winter and summer, as well as a hub for applied conservation research.”

 

Still exposed to climate change, fire, and invasive species, Nasampulli Reserve today pulses with an energy that stands in stark contrast to the destruction of four decades ago. What was once a source of raw material for the sawmills is now a sanctuary where restoration work and science coexist with the flight of the cachañas. Thanks to the daring of a handful of visionaries, a forest that forty years ago seemed condemned is growing toward the light once more —a living fossil, again, of hope.