Picture this: it's freezing, pitch black, drizzling, and you're about to run up a mountain in the Chilean rainforest. That's the setup for the UTMB Torrencial in Valdivia, in the Los Ríos region of southern Chile — now Latin America's biggest trail running event. It started a decade ago with 300 local runners; this year 3,000 people from nearly 30 countries turned up to race through mud, ferns and near-darkness.
The writer of the original piece entered the beginner-friendly 6km night race, held in the depths of the southern winter. Before the start, an Indigenous Mapuche singer performs an ancestral welcome chant — runners are on Mapuche land — before everyone disappears into the forest with head torches. Her route involved a 350-metre ascent through mud so deep her poles sank six inches per stride (for comparison, her usual 'hilly' London park tops out at 50 metres). She finished at 4:25 a.m., nearly last, and immediately wanted more.
That's the story behind the numbers: the race has grown participation by 900% in under a decade, and the fastest-growing group is women new to the sport, running the shorter 6km and 12km distances. Head organiser Marcela Escalona puts it simply — Valdivia in winter teaches you to love the rain, and the off-peak season means quiet trails and freedom in the rainforest.
The setting is a genuine draw beyond the race itself. The Valdivian temperate rainforest, wedged between the Pacific and the Andes, survived the last Ice Age and claims some of the cleanest air on Earth, scented with Mañío and ancient Canelo trees. Most travellers skip this corner of Chile for the Atacama Desert or Torres del Paine, which is exactly the point.
Recovery here is a proper holiday in its own right. The author soaked in a hot tub at Hotel Puerto del Sur with a pisco sour, watching the mountain she'd just climbed across the Cruces River. Two hours from Valdivia sits Huilo Huilo, a 100,000-hectare Unesco-protected reserve home to Darwin's frogs, pumas and the tiny pudu deer — plus three Michelin Guide hotels, including Montaña Mágica, a treehouse with a waterfall running down its side. Winter activities include snowmobiling up the Mocho Choshuenco volcano, snowshoeing back down, and soaking in the Rañintulelfu hot springs at sunset.
Why should a traveller care? Trail running is shifting from fringe ultra-culture into a genuine reason to book a trip, and Valdivia is its southern hemisphere flagship. The entry-level distances make it genuinely accessible — one 100km finisher the writer met started with a tearful 14km. If racing isn't your thing, the region rewards the trip anyway: Huilo Huilo even hosts a 20km volcano-side race in November for anyone tempted to come back for sunrise on the trail.