Getting here requires commitment—a two-kilometer walk beyond the last parking area, through forest where coihue trees lean at improbable angles and fungus erupts in shelf formations from fallen logs. The trail is muddy in sections, marked sporadically by cairns and the occasional faded blaze. Then the trees thin and you step onto a crescent of grey sand facing northwest into Bahía Arias, a cove so protected that the water barely moves.
“Bahía Arias is the park's least-visited accessible beach, requiring enough effort to filter out casual visitors entirely.”
White cliffs over a desert beach
The beach is narrow, backed immediately by forest, giving you the sensation of standing in a theatre's orchestra pit while mountains perform across the bay. You can see the entire curve of the coastline from here—Lapataia to the east, the channel opening toward Chile to the west. Driftwood logs, bleached white and smoothed by years of tides, create natural benches at the high-tide line. Kelp lies in tangled ropes along the wrack, studded with pink coralline algae.
The water is dark—brown-green where it's shallow, deepening to near-black in the channel—and still enough to reflect clouds with barely a ripple. In summer, the midnight sun gilds the mountains across the bay around 10pm, light that seems to last for hours. You hear birds you can't identify, calls echoing from the forest canopy. The remoteness is absolute; you could spend an entire afternoon here and never see another human.
