In 1992, Douglas Tompkins began buying Chilean wilderness; decades later, much of it became the 994,000-acre Pumalín National Park, larger than Yosemite

Imagine buying wild land not to build on it, but simply to leave it alone. That is what Douglas Tompkins did. He co-founded the clothing brands The North Face and Esprit, then sold his stake and started buying land in southern Chile. According to Tompkins Conservation, the organization Tompkins founded, this land-buying effort began in 1992 and eventually grew into Pumalín National Park, a 994,331-acre reserve that is larger than Yosemite National Park. It is one of the largest land gifts a private citizen has ever given to a country.

A quiet start in the Chilean rainforest
Tompkins did not announce a grand plan at first. Tompkins Conservation notes that he began by buying farms and forest tracts to protect the region's pristine temperate rainforest, one of the wettest and least disturbed forest types left on Earth. Over time, those purchases connected into a single stretch of wilderness running from the Andes Mountains to the fjords of Chile's Pacific coast. The park also helps protect the endangered alerce tree, one of the oldest living tree species on the planet, along with the volcanoes, glaciers, and lakes scattered across the reserve.

Bigger than one of America's most famous parks
Here is a number that puts things in perspective for US readers. According to the National Park Service, Yosemite covers 759,620 acres. Pumalín, at 994,000 acres, is clearly bigger, a comparison Tompkins Conservation itself draws in its own announcement. Unlike Yosemite, which the US government set aside as protected land from the start, Pumalín began as one man's private property, bought parcel by parcel over decades. Tompkins eventually donated close to 725,000 of those acres to Chile, making it one of the largest private land donations to a nation on record.

Locals were suspicious at first, and that is understandable
As noted by Tompkins Conservation, Tompkins' land purchases were met with real opposition and controversy at a time when Chileans were not used to seeing outsiders acquire land purely for conservation instead of farming, logging, or mining. That skepticism did not disappear overnight, and it took years of visible results before attitudes began to shift.

A peer-reviewed study helps explain what happened next. According to a study titled ‘Private Protection Initiatives in Mountain Areas of Southern Chile and Their Perceived Impact on Local Development—The Case of Pumalín Park,’ published in the journal Sustainability by geographer Benedikt Hora, who interviewed residents and reviewed local records, the nearby town of Chaitén gradually came to see Pumalín as a real source of jobs and income. That shift became especially clear after a volcanic eruption devastated the town in 2008, when tourism tied to the park helped Chaitén rebuild its economy.

The land finally became public in 2018
Tompkins died in a kayaking accident in 2015, before the final handover could happen. His wife, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, who also worked in the outdoor apparel industry herself, carried the plan forward. In February 2018, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet signed a decree officially creating "Pumalín National Park – Douglas R. Tompkins," folding the reserve into Chile's national park system and naming it after its founder.

At the signing, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins said she felt honored that, according to Tompkins Conservation, "his vision to create national parks is recognized in a permanent way." The signing was also part of a larger deal that added more than 10 million acres of new protected land across Chilean Patagonia.

Why this story matters to a US audience
For millennials and young adults who grew up hearing "reduce, reuse, recycle" and are now watching wildfires and heat waves become normal news, this story lands differently than a typical rich-guy-buys-land headline. Tompkins did not just write a check to a cause. He spent decades of his life and much of his fortune buying, restoring, and eventually giving away land larger than one of America's most beloved national parks, according to Tompkins Conservation and the National Park Service. He also showed that private land bought amid real local suspicion can end up benefiting the community around it, as the Sustainability study on Chaitén found. That is a slower, messier version of philanthropy than simply cutting a check, and it took him more than two decades to see through.

Pumalín today is open to anyone. It has hiking trails, campgrounds, and cabins along Chile's scenic Carretera Austral highway, and it welcomes visitors from Chile and abroad. You can now to walk through the same rainforest Tompkins spent his life trying to save. You just need a plane ticket and a decent pair of hiking boots.