South America's Most Peaceful Wilderness Lodges

The Tranquil Traveller

Explora Atacama is the recovery room for the world's driest desert. The 50-room lodge sits on a 42-acre estate of gardens on the edge of San Pedro, with four linked pools, a sauna and steam circuit, open-air jacuzzis and its own observatory for skies about as dark as they get. More than 40 small-group explorations, from salt-flat walks to high-altitude lagoons and hot springs, are all included. It loses points for being a short walk from a busy town, but as a base it is hard to beat.

Location

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Tranquility Index

70 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

This is the easiest way to add real Amazon to a Peru trip without roughing it. Inkaterra's 35 thatched cabanas sit along the Madre de Dios River inside a 17,000-hectare private reserve next to Tambopata, 25 minutes by air from Cusco and then a boat ride with the city gone for good. Each cabana has a screened balcony and a hammock; a 30-metre canopy walkway handles the wildlife. It is comfortable rather than austere, and completely cut off from roads.

Location

Tambopata, Peru

Tranquility Index

77 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Tierra Patagonia is the one to pick if you want the drama of Torres del Paine and a serious spa in the same day. The lodge is a single low curve of blond timber on a bluff above Lake Sarmiento, designed to sit down in the landscape rather than on top of it, and all 40 rooms look straight at the Paine massif. Days are guided walks and drives; evenings are the Uma Spa, where a heated infinity pool sits in a glass box facing the peaks. It is just outside the park, which keeps it calmer than the lodges within.

Location

Torres del Paine, Chile

Tranquility Index

83 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

EOLO is a single low ranch house alone on the Patagonian steppe, halfway between El Calafate and the Perito Moreno Glacier, at the centre of a 10,000-acre estancia. There are 17 rooms and no televisions, just couches pulled up to big windows onto the grass, the lake and the Andes. You walk, ride and watch birds on the estate's own land, then come back to a sauna, a hot tub and a Relais & Chateaux table. It trades national-park proximity for something rarer: complete quiet and a great deal of sky.

Location

El Calafate, Argentina

Tranquility Index

83 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Mashpi puts a wall of glass between you and one of the most biodiverse forests on earth, and not much else. The lodge holds just 24 rooms in a steel-and-glass frame in the Ecuadorian Choco, inside a private reserve of around 3,000 acres that shelters pumas, monkeys and some 400 species of bird. A gondola and a hand-pedalled sky bike let you sit in the canopy without effort, and the spa works with plants from the reserve. It is a research station as much as a hotel, which is part of why it feels so calm.

Location

Choco Cloud Forest, Ecuador

Tranquility Index

83 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Nothing else in Patagonia is quite this private. Awasi is a scatter of 14 timber villas on its own reserve, each raised on stilts and turned to face the Torres del Paine massif across Lake Sarmiento. The difference is the guiding: every villa gets its own guide and 4x4 for the stay, so you leave when you want, walk what you want, and never queue behind a group. Days end at a small main lodge built for slow dinners, not entertainment.

Location

Torres del Paine, Chile

Tranquility Index

90 / 100