The Singular Patagonia

The night before we arrive at the Singular, Mrs Smith and I sleep atop a tangle of tree roots in a dark enclosed space that smells – sorry to lower the tone here – of feet. Mrs Smith calls this ‘a tent’, I call this: what have I done to make you hate me?

This was the deal. I get to go to a nice hotel, if we put in four days of hiking and camping beforehand. It’s a pact with the devil and I have paid with one, if not both, of my knees. Yes, Torres del Paine truly is one of the most beautiful places on earth, yes, I did see my first glacier and spontaneously burst into tears, and yes, the whole way through, my conversation is repetitive.  ‘Where are we going next?’ I ask her. ‘The Singular,’ she says, for the eighteenth time. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ ‘No, we are 83 kilometers away. By foot.’

When finally the big day comes and we are liberated from our tent, I use the very last of my cartilage to limp from our 4x4 towards the hotel. From a distance, the Singular blends seamlessly into its surroundings – the Scotland meets Mordor of the landscape, the monopoly houses of painted wood, the arctic trawlers skimming fish from the lake. And it should – it’s been there since 1915.

Formerly a cold storage plant, abandoned for 30 years, and then revived in an act of ambition and sheer magic by descendants of the former owners and architect Pedro Kovacic, it’s the only hotel in Chile that’s also a museum. Singular by name, singular by nature, it makes its bed perfectly between two reds – the rusty red of seafarers and the crisp, luxe scarlet of a red carpet.

We wander into a cathedral of corrugated iron. At first, it feels like a farm on sea, then, slowly the other side unfurls: gleaming glass, a team of concierge in ruby gilets, and – just what the knee doctor ordered – a working funicular. And so it begins, the curious unfolding of old and new, riches and ruggedness, heritage, hedonism and stop-all-the-clocks hydraulics (inside, the corridors runs like a river alongside stunning, herculean original factory machinery).

Patagonia derives its name from Patagon, a native people who were said to be double average human height. Our bath was made for such a person. This is my first destination. By the time our bags arrive on a gleaming porter’s cart, I have already had two baths, eight showers, another bath, and a final shower for luck. I take a moment to lie spread-eagled on the heated floor. 

'I feel like I am being reborn,' I tell Mrs Smith.

We fall into bed. The glass of our window steams up like that scene in Titanic.

'I remember this…' I say, my hands roaming.

'You’re nowhere near me.' Mrs Smith says.

'…bed linen.'

Our rebirth continues in the spa – Mondrian-esque lines of steel and glass – where the tip of an L-shaped pool slips you outside into the open air, and a cedar sauna toasty enough to scorch your septum saves you afterwards. 

Rebirth part two happens at the bar, where its sextuple-height ceilings are held aloft by tall beams of 100-year-old slow-growing lenga, and cocktails made from calafate berries and rhubarb are so good they make you want to hold your lover’s hands.

Reader, the truth will out eventually, so I may as well say it now. I did not leave the hotel. OK so there was a touch of rain – the four-seasons-in-a-day Patagonia weather vane was stuck in a rut on our trip – but the truth is, I didn’t want to. As a great wise man (my uncle Charles) once said: follow your joy. Mine was here. Losing at chess by the Game of Thrones size fire. Spending hours trying to to take pictures of wild black necked swans for Mrs Smith’s mother, but uniquely capturing their bottoms as they ducked. Reading The New York Times international edition that was slipped under our door each morning. Slicing through some of my life’s best steak, seared to the point of transcendence in the Singular’s blacksmith BBQ.

Here’s the thing: the hotel is so part of the landscape, you feel a part of it even when you’re inside. Comforts, of course, abound – apricot walls, dark wood and emperor beds – but it’s clear in every architectural decision: the hotel was made to demur to the world outside it. The windows in our bedroom outsize a cinema screen, which makes our bed a front row seat to the blockbuster outside: velveteen hills, wild horses, low-lying clouds, the wind playing skip with telephone wires, the epic, tooth-like Andes. At night, the twinkling lights of cargo ships look like fallen stars. Even the words themselves are romantic: fjord, pampas, and the bay we look out on: the Last Hope Sound inlet. 

Patagonia is the kind of place where if you love someone, you want to hold them tight. It’s the kind of place where you imagine if you had a compass in your palm it might just suddenly start spinning.  When we first got in our car, we turned on the radio and it was broadcasting straight from the Falklands, 1930 – complete with cattle-rustling reports and sea shanties. 

It’s the land of the unlikely, and there’s nowhere like the Singular to experience it. Indelibly linked to the land by its history, it never tries to dilute the weird, wild eeriness of the world that surrounds it – it embraces it. And, crucially, it kisses your knees better.