‘It’s the wildest place I have walked’: new national park will join up Chile’s 2,800km wildlife corridor

The Sarmiento de Gamboa glacier in the strait of Magellan. Chile’s planned Cape Froward national park lies on the north shore of the strait. Photograph: Pablo Sanhueza/Reuters

Chile’s government is poised to create the country’s 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of pristine wilderness and completing a wildlife corridor stretching 1,700 miles (2,800km) to the southernmost tip of the Americas.

The Cape Froward national park is a wild expanse of wind-torn coastline and forested valleys that harbours unrivalled biodiversity and has played host to millennia of human history.