Tablet Trips combine expert-led, artisanal travel adventures with elevated stays at some of our most soul-stirring hotels. Here are the places you’ll enjoy on our trip to Chilean Patagonia.
Tablet Trips are here. These once-in-a-lifetime journeys immerse you in a destination through excursions and activities rarely available to visitors, while setting aside time so you can relax and enjoy a selection of experiences at unforgettable hotels — all curated through Tablet’s singular lens.
We’re starting with five trips:
Puglia
Provence
Patagonia
Japan
Morocco
What makes our trips special — other than the unique daily itineraries and small groups — are the hotel stays. Tablet Trips features smaller, more exceptional hotels not usually found on these types of travels. These thought-provoking properties are as much a part of the overall story as anything else on the itinerary. Best of all, the trip schedule is never overstuffed. You’ll be busy, but we’ve built in free time at the hotels so you can take a moment to detach, unwind, and explore.
THE PATAGONIA TRIP:
Architecture and hospitality in the most dramatic landscapes on earth
Patagonia’s vast skies, soaring peaks, and wide-open grasslands have a way of making human scale feel small. Accompanied by acclaimed Chilean architect Cazú Zegers, designer of Tierra Patagonia, this trip explores what it means to inhabit such a wild, remote environment—from the comfort of one of South America’s most architecturally distinguished hotels. An optional extension transports us to another extreme environment: the Atacama Desert.
Our trip begins in Santiago, Chile’s vibrant capital city. From there, we’ll travel far south to Torres del Paine National Park. Accompanied by Cazú and Tierra Patagonia’s naturalist-guides, we’ll hike wide-open trails, sail glacier-blue lakes, ride horseback across the steppe, and share meals with our hosts. Returning to Santiago, the trip continues with an optional extension to the Atacama Desert. If southern Patagonia’s natural environment is wild, the Atacama’s is practically Martian.
Learn more about the Tablet Trip to Patagonia. Learn more about the featured hotels below.
The days when Santiago was seen as just a stop along the way to Patagonia are past. It’s always been an interesting city, of course, but it’s only recently that it’s become an urban destination unto itself, showcasing its food, its culture, and its design along with its proximity to Chile’s famous wild landscapes. Hotel Magnolia just might be the first proper design hotel in town, and it’s no tentative first step but a full-on plunge into the world of boutique-hotel style. It’s housed in a landmark building which dates back to the 1920s but looks for all the world like something from the 1520s, and in its present-day guise it resembles the bottom part of a Gothic cathedral half-covered by a modern glass tower.
From the proper angle, Tierra Patagonia looks like little more than a fissure in the earth, a minor geological feature beneath the gasp-inducing major ones of Chilean Patagonia’s Torres del Paine National Park. It’s a landscape so strikingly otherworldly that, from a modest distance, this UFO–shaped hotel blends in nearly to the point of imperceptibility. But while the setting is end-of-the-earth rugged, the hotel itself is casually luxurious. The interiors are largely glass and natural woods in varying states of rawness, from gnarly sun-bleached tree branches and crooked log support-beams to soft wood floors that beg for bare feet. All forty rooms face Lago Sarmiento and the ever-present jumble of peaks, the Paine Massif, beyond.
Tierra Atacama brings some serious comfort to an otherwise inhospitable location. The minimalist design of this 32-room boutique hotel does not lack in comparison to the visually striking environment of the Atacama Desert — the building more than holds its own against the views of the volcano in the distance, with clean modernist lines rendered in the humblest materials, local stone, adobe and rough-hewn wood. The rooms are very much up to the latest luxury standard, and today’s high-end audiences are well aware that there’s no contradiction between the visual severity of these sparsely decorated spaces and the warm embrace of their tactile comforts.
WHAT ARE TABLET TRIPS?
Tablet Trips are curated journeys for boutique hotel lovers. With your specialist trip leader and a small group of Tablet travelers, you’ll meet artisans, insiders, and luminaries to learn about the local culture, with an emphasis on architecture, design, craft, cooking, and cuisine. Then, our unique spin on trips: stays at hotels that tell an essential part of the story, located in the neighborhoods and natural surroundings you came all this way to see.
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