PARQUE PATAGONIA, Chile -- Chilean President Michelle Bachelet signed decrees Monday creating vast new national parks using lands donated by a U.S. conservation organization in what is believed to be the largest private donation of land ever from a private entity to a country.
The decrees signed by Bachelet and Tompkins Conservation CEO Kristine McDivitt Tompkins will create Pumalin and Patagonia national parks, while expanding others.
That will help create what they call a "Route of Parks" spanning more than 1,500 miles across the South American nation, stretching from Puerto Montt to Cape Horn. In all, the plan ultimately seeks to increase Chile's national parkland by more than 15,600 square miles.
Bachelet said that would expand national parklands in Chile by 38.5 percent.
Tompkins Conservation said the area that will be protected is three times the size of the United States' Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks combined, or about the size of Switzerland.
Since her husband's death in a 2015 kayaking accident, McDivitt Tompkins had been working nonstop to permanently protect from development the millions of acres the couple acquired over 25 years.
Doug Tompkins, the American conservationist and co-founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing companies, used much of his fortune to buy huge tracts of land in Patagonia, a lightly populated region of untamed rivers and other natural beauty straddling southern Chile and Argentina.
At first, his purchases of land to preserve swaths of wilderness caused suspicion and strong opposition by area politicians, loggers, power companies and nationalists who stirred rumors that he was trying to steal water and other resources. But he promised he would eventually return the land to both governments to be preserved as nature reserves or parks.
"This is a reflection of the power of dreams and ideas, built path by path," said McDivitt Tompkins.
"We're proof that nothing is impossible. No dream should go unfulfilled."
Information for this article was contributed by Esteban Felix of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/30/2018