Patagonia: The Ends of the Earth - Wildest Latin America - Go Wild

Covering 800,000 square kilometres of Argentina and Chile, Patagonia is the southernmost part of South America. It’s a place of extremes – of vast ice fields and snow-capped mountains; of windswept deserts and violent oceans. Survival here means being tough enough to cope with brutal winters, and canny enough to exploit brief seasons of plenty.

This film follows a year in Patagonia and sees animals survive in unlikely places. Guanacos, relatives of the camel, sit out snow storms in the Southern Andes. Winter is long and hard and pumas and foxes must scavenge to survive. But when spring finally arrives everything in Patagonia goes into overdrive to make the most of a small window of opportunity. An amorous armadillo struggles to get through his mate’s armoured defences; penguins come ashore to reunite with partners they haven’t seen for six months; even gauchos work hard to train horses they depend on for their livelihoods.

The shorelines teem with ocean giants. Elephant seals arrive on the beaches in their thousands. Males stage bloody battles to win mating rights over harems of females. Southern right whales come to the sheltered bays of Peninsula Valdes to give birth to young that weigh 1000 kilograms. Killer whales patrol the shores, beaching themselves in spectacular hunting charges, picking off naive sea-lion pups that have yet to learn what dangers await them in the oceans.

Autumn closes in all too soon and Patagonia’s wildlife braces itself for another tough winter in Southern America’s last great wilderness.