Darwin's Route — La Campana Palm Forest Hike from Santiago

You push through a ribbon of dust-streaked trail and the air changes: it smells of sun-warmed leaves and something older, resinous and green. Towering palms—Jubaea chilensis—rise like columns, their trunks thick and sober, and the coastal range opens toward distant ridgelines that lean toward the Pacific. This is La Campana National Park, an hour-and-a-half from Santiago, and the route that inspired Charles Darwin’s notebooks still asks you to move slowly enough to notice small things—a lichen that clings like a crust, the furtive flash of a bird between oak trunks.