Before the granite spires of Patagonia became postcards for a bucket-list destination, before the whisper of trekking poles echoed through the lenga forests and condors shadowed ultralight tents pitched on glacial valleys—before any of that— Chile’s southern frontier was a place people fled, not flocked to.
It was the edge of the known world: a stretch of wind-flayed wilderness where the promise of land came laced with frostbite, isolation, and the humbling silence of wide, empty spaces. That’s precisely the time and place that the Kusanovic family’s Patagonian story begins. What started with a teenage boy escaping a dying vineyard on a Croatian island at the turn of the 20th century would slowly, defiantly evolve into one of Patagonia’s most remarkable family sagas—a multigenerational story of immigration, adaptation, and grit. It’s a story shaped by the social movements of the time, the evolution of the region’s economy, and by donkeys delivering meat along muddy rural backroads and women defending ranches with shotguns. And eventually, it’s a story of legacy reclaimed: of a forgotten stretch of land beneath the towers of Torres del Paine, transformed into one of South America’s most celebrated conservation destinations.
Today, travelers come from around the world to hike the famed W and O Circuits, drink Pisco sours at eco-lodges, and gaze in reverence at the towers that touch the clouds. Few know the story of how this same place was once the backlot of exile—a place reserved for those desperate or daring enough to wrest life from its brutal terrain.
The Kusanovićs were both. They arrived with nothing, except for a reputation back home for being stubborn— a trait that, over the decades, would prove to be less a flaw and more a family creed. From the salty vineyards of Brač to the bog- soaked swamplands of Estancia Cerro Negro, from political upheaval in Santiago to the improbable founding of a hotel in what was once deemed useless land, their story is one of survival against odds, told not in memoirs, but in timber, wool, and the steady thrum of cattle hooves on cold earth.
This is the story of how a family not only endured Patagonia—but helped define it.
The story of the Kusanović family begins not in Patagonia, but halfway across the world on the sun-baked slopes of Brač Island, Croatia—then a remote outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, in the village of Pražnica, Antonio Kusanović Jerc̀ić was born in 1890 into a community as proud as it was impoverished.
Life on the Dalmatian coast was shaped by the rhythms of the Adriatic and the rows of grapevines that clung to the rocky hillsides like a lifeline. For centuries, viticulture was the island’s economic and cultural backbone. But in the late 1800s, disaster arrived on six legs.
Phylloxera vastatrix, an aphid-like pest, swept through the vineyards of Europe with quiet devastation. France and Italy were hit first. Then the parasite crossed the Adriatic. By the time it reached Croatia, it had already proven to be more destructive than any war.
Entire communities watched helplessly as their vines withered, their soil soured, and their futures evaporated. “There was nothing left,” says Liliana Kusanović, Antonio’s granddaughter. “The grapes died, and with them, any chance of surviving on the island.”
Like many Dalmatian boys at the time, Antonio left school early. At just 15, he boarded a steamship bound for the bottom of the world—not to the glittering cities of Europe or the promise of America, but to a little-known port called Punta Arenas, Chile. His brother Juan had made the journey three years earlier, paving the way through letters and stories of a harsh but promising frontier.
Now it was Antonio’s turn to follow, chasing opportunity across the ocean to a land more rugged than anything he had ever known. The voyage itself was grueling. Most migrants endured weeks in cramped, unsanitary steerage, sleeping on wooden bunks and surviving on stale bread, boiled potatoes, and the occasional bowl of soup. Crossing the Atlantic, then rounding Cape Horn—one of the most treacherous maritime routes on Earth—was a rite of passage no one spoke of afterward. “He never told stories about the journey,” Liliana explains. “I think he wanted to forget it. It must have been awful.”
What awaited him was no paradise. Punta Arenas in 1906 was a cold, wind-scoured frontier town lashed by Antarctic gusts and shrouded in isolation. Streets were muddy tracks. Wood-plank houses leaned against each other as if for warmth. The town was a patchwork of Croatian, English, and indigenous influences—its population swelling with newcomers drawn by sheep-farming fortunes and the promise of land.
But opportunity came with a price: bone-chilling winters, primitive infrastructure, and a class hierarchy that was slow to welcome outsiders. Still, in a foreign land and harsh climate, Antonio found fragments of home. Croatians had been arriving in southern Chile since the 1860s, forming tightly-knit enclaves where the language, food, and customs of Dalmatia endured.
There, among secondhand shops and butcher stalls, Antonio reconnected with distant relatives— including a cousin, named very similar Antonio Kusanović Kusanović, and a more established countryman, Vicente Kusanović, who ran a modest butcher shop. It was in the back rooms of that shop that the Kusanović story in Chile began in earnest.
“Men of that generation didn’t sit around reminiscing,” Liliana says. “They didn’t write memoirs. They built them—with calloused hands, little sleep, and no complaints.” And build they did. Not in the lush vineyards of their ancestors, but in the wind-beaten grasslands and sodden peat fields of a continent they would spend a lifetime trying to tame.
The two Antonios—distant cousins who shared both a surname and an appetite for reinvention— entered Chilean folklore not through politics or fortune, but astride donkeys, hauling sides of meat through mud-choked backroads on the wind-scoured edge of the continent.
One was extremely tall and lanky, his legs so long they nearly brushed the earth as he rode, prompting grins from townspeople and whispered jokes in Croatian dialect. The other was also tall, but noticeably a bit shorter. Together, they became a living cartoon—two silhouettes wobbling side by side down the streets of Punta Arenas, their figures etched into memory long before any family crest or business ledger.
The region remembered. And so, the cousins were immortalized in local shorthand: los de piernas largas—Antonio Kusanović Kusanović, the long-legged Kusanović—and los de piernas cortas— Antonio Kusanović Jerc̀ić, the short-legged Kusanović. The nicknames stuck, handed down like heirlooms, passed along to children and grandchildren regardless of actual height, as if time refused to forget how it all began.
But beyond their mismatched gaits was something far sturdier—a shared ethic that had followed them across oceans. Antonio Kusanović Jerc̀ić, came from a branch of the family known back in Brač by the nickname Dudi— a term that roughly translated to “the stubborn ones.” It was meant as a kind of teasing badge, worn like a callus. In Chile, for Antonio Kusanović Jerc̀ić and his descendants, it became something more: a prophecy.
Antonio arrived with little. No capital. No land. Just an unyielding belief that work— unglamorous, unrelenting work—could carve out a place for them in a new world. They started at the bottom, laboring in other men’s butcher shops, waking at dawn to scrub blood from the floors and hauling crates through slush and sleet. When the opportunity came, they didn’t hesitate. In 1908, the cousins opened their own butcher shop. It was little more than a timber shack, patched together with corrugated iron and fierce optimism. But it was theirs.
From there, ambition overtook everything. They began leasing stretches of land that no one else wanted—tracts labeled “Class C” by the government, considered too swampy, too remote, or too wind-blasted to be of any real use. They drained bogs, cleared lenga forests by hand, and built a sawmill from felled trees they dragged out themselves. With that lumber, they fueled Punta Arenas’ hearths, built fences, and expanded the shop.
They raised cattle and sheep on those stubborn lands, bred not just for meat, but for wool. They processed animal fat and sold it for soap. Furthermore, they turned waste into profit. And, slowly, they turned themselves into landowners. It wasn’t glamorous, and it wasn’t easy. But there is something quietly radical about building a legacy where no one else was looking.
The two cousins— mismatched in stature, identical in will—saw opportunity where others saw ruin. That stubbornness, passed down like bone structure, would shape not just their families, but the Patagonian frontier itself.
In time, the cousins charted separate paths. One struck out to pursue his own ventures, while the other turned north, drawn toward a province with a name as evocative as a promise—Última Esperanza—where he would one day lay the foundations for Estancia Cerro Negro.
It was the moment the cousins parted ways—an unspoken acknowledgment that the past would no longer bind their futures, and that even kinship has its limits when ambition runs high on both sides. Over the years, their divergence felt inevitable. As any rancher might tell you, two riders can’t hold the same reins.
What united them remained stronger than what divided them: their immigrant grit, their sheer physical and emotional stature, and a shared belief that land was something you didn’t just inherit— you earned it.
By 1940, Antonio Kusanović Jerc̀ić had been in Chile for more than three decades. He had delivered meat by donkey, shoveled sawdust in backroom butcher shops, and felled trees in the bone-deep cold of southern Patagonia. He had endured economic collapses, political turbulence, and the creeping suspicion from native Chileans who viewed Croatians as strange-tongued outsiders. But he was no longer a boy from Brač. He was a builder.
That year, using lenga and coigüe timber milled with his own hands, Antonio constructed a family home on a stretch of rugged, unwanted land in Última Esperanza Province. Hills rolled unevenly across the terrain, veined with peat bogs and dense underbrush. The soil was wet and acidic. The winds blew hard enough to take the door off its hinges if you didn’t bolt it. “All the good land was already taken,” explains Antonio’s granddaughter, Liliana. “So they took what was left—the swamps, the hills. It was third-class land. But they made it work.”
The land was leased at first, not owned— another reminder that their place in this country was still conditional. But with relentless labor, the family cleared forest, built fences, raised livestock, and wrestled sustenance from the earth. Then, in 1945, a massive wildfire swept the Estancia. Flames devoured everything, leaving behind only smoke and scorched earth.
Antonio stood on a blackened hill and gave it a name: Estancia Cerro Negro—“Black Hill Ranch.” It was not a name of mourning. It was a declaration. A vow. The family would rebuild from the ashes. And they did.
What followed were years of remarkable growth. Antonio, now a seasoned patriarch, joined forces with other members of the extended Kusanović clan to make an audacious bid for Estancia Mina Rica—a vast and costly tract of land near Punta Arenas. The move was risky; the terrain’s value was still uncertain. But Antonio had developed a gift for spotting opportunity where others saw only hardship.
When global wool prices surged during World War II—driven by Allied demand for uniforms and blankets—the family’s sheep yielded not only fiber, but fortune. The windfall didn’t just stabilize the ranch—it expanded it. And then came an unexpected pivot.
During a visit to Viña del Mar, where Antonio’s daughter Ruby lived with her husband, the cousins found themselves seated in a quiet plaza across from the city’s elegant casino.
On the far side of the square, a skeletal concrete frame was rising into the sky—the beginning of a ten-story modernist building. They were curious. So they wandered over and struck up a conversation with the architect. By the end of the visit, the cousins had agreed to invest in the project. Their offer was simple: help complete construction, and in exchange, a handful of apartments— and their name—would be permanently affixed to the building. A gesture of confidence. A legacy etched in stone.
It was a quiet, calculated leap into urban real estate. A world away from the bogs of Estancia Cerro Negro and the windswept fences of Mina Rica, the Kusanović name was now part of the skyline in Chile’s Pacific Riviera. But even then, their identity remained rooted in the land. In the sawmills humming at dawn. In the frost-covered boots of ranchers rising before the sun. In the long-legged shadows of two stubborn cousins who once sold milk and meat by donkey back, and refused to be told what was impossible.
They had arrived in Patagonia with nothing but calloused hands and stubborn hearts. By mid-century, they had timber in the hills, livestock in the valleys, and their name carved into the coastal concrete of a modernizing Chile. It was a life not inherited, but hewn— timber by timber, hoofprint by hoofprint, refusal by refusal to back down.
By the 1960s, stewardship of the Kusanović legacy passed to Antonio Kusanović Senković—a man who inherited not only the land his father had fought so hard to tame, but also his entrepreneurial instincts and unshakable resolve. A builder like his father, but also a dreamer, Antonio had expanded the family’s footprint across Patagonia, introducing new cattle breeds from Australia, investing in machinery, and establishing Estancia Cerro Negro as one of the most innovative ranches in the region.
But the Chile he faced was rapidly changing. The 1970s ushered in one of the most politically volatile periods in the country’s history. President Salvador Allende’s administration launched a sweeping agrarian reform aimed at redistributing land from large landowners to rural collectives. Across the country, estancias—many run by families for generations—were marked for expropriation. Some were taken overnight. Others were dismantled gradually, by decree.
Estancia Cerro Negro, though never a symbol of elite aristocracy, was included within the scope of the agrarian reform policies being implemented across the country. The announcement came, as so many moments of rupture do, without warning. “It was lunchtime,” Liliana Kusanović recalls. “We were listening to the radio. Suddenly, the governor read out a list of properties. Estancia Cerro Negro was on it. They said it was poorly managed. That it wasn’t productive enough. It was absurd. My father was a visionary. He brought the first carefully bred Australian cattle to the region. He modernized everything. But that didn’t matter. It was politics.”
The shock turned quickly to fear. Then, fear turned to action. The family, accustomed to building fences and branding calves, began preparing for something else entirely—defense. Rifles were pulled from their cases. Men climbed to the rooftop of the main house, scanning the horizon.
It wasn’t their longtime ranch hands who raised concerns. The cattle workers—many of whom had been with the family for years, even decades— remained fiercely loyal. They stood by Antonio, knowing the land and the legacy as well as any Kusanović. “They were part of the family,” Mauricio Kusanović Olate explains. “They knew what we had built together. They never wavered.”
But among the seasonal laborers— especially those hired for the lumber operations—a different tone began to emerge. Whispers turned to rumors. Meetings were held in quiet corners. Some of these workers, less tied to the land and more influenced by the broader social and political climate of the time, began entertaining the possibility of a takeover.
Liliana remembers the tension vividly: “Some of the lumber workers were murmuring. There was a meeting happening—talk about redistributing the land. It was surreal. My father—tough as they come—walked straight into the middle of it and asked, ‘What’s going on here?’ Like a cowboy. He wasn’t confrontational, but he wasn’t going to back down either.” And then there was “Amor”.
Amor Eliana—whose name literally means “love” in Spanish—was the family’s soft-spoken matriarch. She baked bread, kissed bruised knees, and loved unconditionally. But when the time came to protect her family’s home, she didn’t flinch. “She was the sweetest person you could ever meet,” Liliana says. “But she meant business. She sat waiting with a shotgun across her lap. If someone came to take the land, they were going to have to get through her.”
It was a moment that bordered on myth— equal parts defiance and desperation. But it captured the truth of the time. For families like the Kusanovićs, the threat of seizure wasn’t just economic; it was existential. Land was not just acreage—it was identity, labor, legacy.
What ultimately spared Estancia Cerro Negro was a volatile shift in national politics. In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup that violently overthrew Allende’s presidency. The agrarian reform program was halted, and land seizures were suspended. Estancia Cerro Negro remained intact—saved not by law, but by the accident of history. Still, the scars lingered.
“There was fear in every room,” Liliana says. “But what kept us going was the support of our ranch workers. They stood by my father. They didn’t want the government to take over. That loyalty—that sense of shared purpose—it meant everything.”
It’s easy, in retrospect, to romanticize these moments. But for those who lived through them, they were marked by sleepless nights and the dull ache of uncertainty. For nearly a year, the family slept lightly, half-dressed and half-ready, unsure if that day would be the one someone came to take it all away. And yet they endured.
It would not be the last time the Kusanovićs faced a fight for survival. But in that crucible of doubt and danger, surrounded by loyal ranch hands, stubborn fences, and the roar of wind that had always defined their corner of Patagonia, they held the line.
By 1979, Antonio Kusanović Senković had earned a reputation as a pragmatic rancher with an appetite for risk. He had weathered the political storms of Chile’s most tumultuous decade, survived the threat of expropriation, and expanded his family’s reach across the windswept lands of southern Patagonia. Now, in the wake of an economic, he was ready to gamble again.
The land in question sat nestled against the looming granite towers of Torres del Paine. It was called Estancia Cerro Paine—a jagged, remote parcel surrounded on all sides by what was fast becoming Chile’s most iconic national park. The views were sublime, the air impossibly clear, but nearly everything else was working against it: the roads were primitive, the winters brutal, and infrastructure minimal.
“Everyone thought he was crazy,” says Liliana Kusanović, his daughter. “It was far from town. There were no bridges, no services, not even a real way to get goods in. But he saw something no one else did.”
To the untrained eye, it was a logistical nightmare. To Antonio, it was an opportunity. What few people realized at the time was that Estancia Cerro Paine was the last privately held lands in the sector not already annexed by the national park or marked for future expropriation. Its unique position—right in the heart of Torres del Paine’s geographic footprint—made it both vulnerable and valuable.
The park itself had only been formally established two decades earlier, in 1959, carved out of former sheep-grazing estancias. Slowly, the Chilean government, with help from international conservation groups, had begun absorbing more territory. Most ranchers had long since sold their land or been pushed out. But one portion, previously leased by pioneers like Juan Radic, remained. And in a move that would astonish many, Antonio bought it.
“It was the only private land left inside the park,” explains Mauricio Kusanović Olate, Antonio’s grandson. “CONAF’s management plan —as the authority responsible for Chile’s national parks— explicitly included the expropriation of the ranch among its stated objectives. And he bought it anyway. Everyone told him, ‘You’re insane.’ But he didn’t flinch.”
Antonio moved his cattle in and began ranching as he always had—quietly, diligently, with the long view in mind.
Tourism wasn’t even a whisper. The few foreigners who did make the treacherous trip into the park came with climbing ropes and sleeping bags. There were no domes, no trekking circuits, no Instagram filters.
Then came the economic collapse of the early 1980s. Inflation skyrocketed. The peso devalued. Antonio, like many small landowners, found himself overextended. Debts mounted. Machinery sat idle. His cattle operations struggled to keep up with payments on the land.
That’s when he made a call to his daughter, Liliana, who was living in the United States at the time, earning her MBA. “You said I should start a new business,” he told her over the phone. “So I’m going to build a hotel.”
It was a stunning pivot for a man who had spent his life branding calves and fixing fence posts in 60-knot winds. But once again, Antonio was ahead of his time. A few enterprising tour operators from Punta Arenas had begun asking about places to stay near the park. The demand wasn’t large—but it was growing.
In 1992, after selling a portion of land in Estancia Mina Rica to satisfy the bank, Antonio opened the doors to what was first known as Hostería Las Torres. It wasn’t grand. Only 9 rooms and a small restaurant to begin with. Supplies had been dragged in by oxcart. Construction materials crossed rivers on wooden wagons. Rooms were basic. But it was warm, it was real, and it sat in the most stunning valley in South America.
From that first season, something shifted. Word of mouth traveled faster than the road crews.
Trekkers from Europe and North America began arriving—seeking shelter, hot meals, and stories with soul. They found all three. Antonio didn’t do it alone. At his side was his wife—the quiet strength of the family, its moral compass, and the one who held it all together when the wind blew hardest.
She was the heart behind the hospitality, the keeper of tradition, and the unfailing source of kindness who anchored Antonio and their children through every storm. One by one, Antonio’s children and grandchildren joined the effort—hauling lumber, tending fires, guiding guests.
Together, they expanded the vision plank by plank, campsite by campsite, refugio by refugio. What began as a risky experiment became a living, growing legacy—built by a family whose love for the land was as enduring as the granite towers that rose above it.
“We were a real estancia,” Mauricio says. “A local family, throwing everything we had into something we barely understood—but we believed in it.”
Today, that humble hostería has grown into Hotel Las Torres —no longer a gamble, but a landmark. It stands as a cornerstone of the Torres del Paine experience, hosting thousands of travelers each year who come to witness a landscape once thought unreachable.
But back in 1979, there were no crowds, no trails, no guarantees. There was only Antonio—an aging rancher with calloused hands, a folded map, and a wild hunch that this unforgiving land could become something more. Like everything the Kusanovićs built, it didn’t begin with certainty. It began with grit. With stubborn faith. And with the courage to dream where no one else dared.
What followed was nothing short of visionary. Antonio’s first slogan for the reserve captured it perfectly: “Un paisaje pintado por Dios, donde se escucha el silencio”—“A landscape painted by God, where silence is heard.”
As word of Torres del Paine spread—from hand-sketched trail maps passed between trekkers to glossy features in international travel magazines— Hotel Las Torres transformed. What had begun as a modest lodge, its walls hauled in by oxcart, became a gateway to Patagonia’s soul.
The air was thin, the granite towers otherworldly, and the silence carried a gravity that felt sacred. Travelers began to arrive not just for scenery, but for something deeper—connection, stillness, awe. With each season, the lodge expanded. Roads appeared where there were once only horse trails. Footbridges now crossed rivers that had kept explorers at bay. Electricitycame. Eventually, Wi-Fi too.
But even as the world encroached, the spirit of the place remained unchanged. At its heart, it was still a family ranch—anchored by the same values, shaped by the same wind, and rooted in the same stubborn dream that had started it all.
The Kusanovićs didn’t just build infrastructure— they built connection. “Everything changed once people started arriving,” says Mauricio Kusanović Olate. “We were no longer just cattle ranchers. We became hosts. Storytellers. Stewards.”
By the early 2000s, as tourism began to eclipse ranching as the region’s economic engine, the family made a choice. They wouldn’t simply capitalize on the land— they would care for it. What had begun as survival evolved into stewardship. Antonio passed the reins to his children and grandchildren. Among them was Liliana, the eldest daughter, who had earned an MBA in the United States and returned with spreadsheets, vision, and a deep respect for the land she grew up on.
Together with her siblings—José Antonio, Mauricio, and Vesna—each with their own unique character and strengths, they understood that only by working together could they grow the family legacy.
With Liliana’s guidance, the family professionalized operations, balancing scale with authenticity. But the next generation brought something new: a purpose beyond profit. Led by Liliana’s son Josian, alongside Mauricio and other members of the family, the fourth generation of Kusanovićs began to ask deeper questions.
What did it truly mean to manage a reserve—not just a hotel? Could this land, once dedicated to cattle ranching, evolve into a living classroom and a model for conservation?
In 2013, after decades of raising livestock, the family made a bold and symbolic choice: they would remove all cattle from Estancia Cerro Paine. Horses would remain—for tradition, and for the practical needs of the terrain— but the rhythms of estancia life, the barking dogs, the sharp whistles, the shouting, the old ways, would now have to adapt to the land—not the other way around."
“We knew it was time,” says Mauricio. “It wasn’t about turning our backs on the past. It was about honoring it – by sharing the land with the world.
They called the moment El Último de los Arreos - The Last Roundup. The entire family gathered to move the final herd out of the valley. Old gauchos wept. Children rode horses beside theirgrandparents. “It felt like a funeral and a birth at the same time,” Mauricio recalls. “We were saying goodbye to what made us who we were. But we were also stepping into who we could become.”
From that day forward, Estancia Cerro Paine was no longer just an estancia. It became Las Torres Patagonia—a private conservation area rooted in sustainable tourism, ecological restoration, and community engagement.
In 2004, Liliana, her son Josian, and longtime team member Cristian Morales founded the NGO AMA Torres del Paine to lead this effort. The organization quickly became not just a support structure, but a strategic force—tasked with implementing and managing the reserve’s complex Environmental Management Plan, a challenge that marked a major step forward in the reserve’s evolution.
Today, the NGO has a new name: Las Torres Conservancy. But its mission remains the same—to restore, protect, and educate. Local students, many visiting the park for the first time, now hike the trails, plant trees, and discover that their homeland is not only beautiful, but worth protecting.
They built their own ranger team—from trail builders and wildlife monitors to hospitality staff trained in Leave No Trace principles. They introduced a holistic land management system rooted in rotational grazing—designed to regenerate the soil and bring livestock practices into deeper harmony with nature—ensuring there was still space for horses to pasture.
Organic gardens now supply the kitchen, and renewable energy is gradually taking the place of older systems, with solar panels envisioned as a key part of the future.
Even the cocktails at the bar tell a story—infused with native herbs and served with a garnish of conservation awareness. And through it all, the Kusanović family remains at the helm—not as distant owners, but as hands-on stewards, storytellers, and guardians of legacy.
“As ranchers, we’ve always loved the land— always loved nature,” says Mauricio. “But now, we’ve learned how to share it with the world.” Today, Las Torres Patagonia has embedded in its mission and vision the goal of becoming a world leader in sustainable tourism and conservation. But for those who carry the Kusanović name, it remains something far more personal. It is still the place where Antonio built a home from lenga wood, where Amor once stood guard with a shotgun to protect her children, where oxen hauled hotel walls across icy rivers, and where—on a windswept hill—the family chose not merely to endure history, but to shape it.
And so the story continues, carried now by great-grandchildren who walk the same ridges, ask new questions, and tend to the land with the same stubborn devotion that began it all.
The Kusanović story is not just one of migration or entrepreneurship. It is a story of survival—of families who endured the collapse of Croatia’s grape economy, who crossed oceans with little more than hope, who faced down expropriation, communist regimes and the deafening silence of Patagonian winter.
It’s a story where stubbornness is a virtue, risk is a calling, and work is the common language passed down through generations. There are still fences at Estancia Cerro Negro built by hand. Still lenga trees rising from fire-scarred hills. Still hoofprints from a time when donkeys hauled meat through muddy roads and oxen dragged hotel walls across rivers. Still descendants who speaks of their ancestors not with nostalgia, but with reverence.
Mauricio Kusanović Olate, along with his cousins, represents the third generation to care for these lands—and he understands the weight of that legacy. “Our story has always been about the land,” he says. “At first, it was about surviving on it. Then, about working it. Now, it’s about preserving it— while also creating opportunities for the local communities that call this place home. I truly believe that sustainable tourism is the most powerful tool we have for conservation—because it not only protects natural landscapes, but uplifts the people who live in them.”
The family’s conservation efforts have evolved into something far greater than even Antonio Kusanović Senković could have imagined when he first laid eyes on Estancia Cerro Paine. Today, with over 600 employees, five refugios, an award-winning hotel, and more than 50 kilometers of trails under their care, the Kusanovićs have become unexpected pioneers of one of South America’s most successful conservation tourism models.
At its core is a simple truth: conservation must be valued—and funded. Sustainable tourism is not just compatible with conservation; it is essential to it. Without financial support, preservation is impossible. And in wild, remote places like Patagonia, sustainable tourism becomes the bridge between protecting ecosystems and empowering local communities.
But what makes it remarkable is not just the scale. It’s the intimacy. They have created an organic garden that grows what guests eat. A cocktail bar that tells stories of biodiversity with every drink. A reforestation program that teaches seventh graders to plant roots—not just in the soil, but in their own sense of place.
And in 2013, when the final cattle left Estancia Cerro Paine in what the family called El Último de los Arreos, they didn’t just close a chapter—they opened a new one. They renamed the land Las Torres Patagonia and committed to a future that blends ecological stewardship with cultural continuity.
Horses still roam the valleys. Gauchos still ride. But today, the gauchos who patrol those trails are trained in holistic land management. Guests arrive with cameras via airport transfer. Environmentally conscious custodians of the land now work where cowboys once stood.
“To be a reference point for sustainable tourism and conservation,” Mauricio says, “that’s our goal. We’re not there yet. But that’s the dream. That’s what we wake up for.”
It is a delicate balancing act—between memory and momentum, heritage and innovation. Between the past they were handed and the future they are trying to build. And yet, somehow, they’ve managed to walk that line—boot-scuffed, wind-battered, hearts intact. Because if you visit Estancia Cerro Negro or Hotel Las Torres today, you’re not just entering a ranch or a resort. You’re stepping into a living story carved by donkeys, defended by shotguns, told by firelight, and sustained by the enduring will of a family who never stopped believing that something beautiful could grow—even from the most rugged soil.
And now, that legacy passes to the great-grandchildren—who walk those same trails, breathe that same cold air, and carry a truth etched deep into their bones: this land doesn’t belong to the past. It belongs to those who are willing to love it forward.