Honestly, if you pick up a copy of In Patagonia, don’t expect a guidebook. Don’t even expect a standard travelogue. Bruce Chatwin didn't care about the "best places to eat in Ushuaia" or the bus schedules from Buenos Aires.
He went south for a piece of skin.
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It was a scrap of "brontosaurus" skin, supposedly found by his grandmother’s cousin, Charley Milward, in a cave. It sat in a glass cabinet in Birmingham until it was lost. That little piece of history—which turned out to be the hide of a giant ground sloth called a Mylodon—sent Chatwin spiraling into the deep south of Argentina and Chile in 1974.
He quit his job at the Sunday Times with a legendary telegram: "I am leaving for Patagonia." He stayed for months. Then he came back and changed travel writing forever.
The Book That Broke the Rules
Before this book, travel writing was kinda... dry. It was all "I went here, I saw this, the weather was rainy." Chatwin blew that up. In Patagonia is a collection of 97 short, sharp snippets. Some are half a page. Others are just a few paragraphs.
It's a cubist painting in prose.
He jumps from the story of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hiding out in the pampas to the tragic history of the anarchist strikes in the 1920s. You’ve got Welsh settlers who forgot their English but kept their Welsh, and Russian revolutionaries living in the middle of nowhere. It’s weird. It’s jagged.
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What Most People Get Wrong
The biggest controversy? Accuracy. If you’re looking for a 100% factual record, you’re reading the wrong guy.
People in Patagonia were actually pretty pissed when the book came out. They claimed Chatwin twisted their words or just straight-up made things up to fit his narrative of "restlessness." His biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, basically confirmed that Bruce wasn't above a little "polishing" of the truth.
"Critics suspected that a number of Chatwin’s brontosauri were mylodons."
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Basically, he was looking for a specific kind of truth—a poetic one. He wanted to understand why humans can't sit still. He saw Patagonia as the end of the line, the farthest humans had walked from their origins in Africa. To him, the region was a symbol of the nomadic urge.
Does the "faking it" matter? For some, yeah. It’s a bit of a cheat to call it non-fiction when you’re inventing dialogue. But for most readers, the atmosphere he builds is so thick you can practically feel the Patagonian wind ripping through the pages.
Why You Should Actually Read It
Even in 2026, the book feels modern. It moves fast. It’s not bogged down by the "I" of the narrator. Chatwin is a ghost in his own story, showing up in a kitchen, listening to a gaucho, and then disappearing.
What you’ll find inside:
- The Cave: He eventually finds the Cueva del Milodón near Puerto Natales. He digs in the dirt and finds some reddish hairs.
- The Outlaws: Great sections on the "North American outlaws" who thought they could vanish into the wilderness.
- The Exiles: It’s a book about people who are out of place. Germans, Scots, Boers—everyone is running from something.
How to Follow the Chatwin Trail
If you want to experience the "Chatwin" version of Patagonia, you can still visit the main sites, but don't expect the lawless frontier he described.
- Cueva del Milodón: It’s a massive natural monument now. There’s even a life-sized plastic statue of the sloth. It’s a bit touristy, but the scale of the cave is still staggering.
- Gaiman and Trelew: Visit the Welsh tea houses. They still serve torta negra (black cake), and the Welsh language is still surprisingly alive in this pocket of Chubut.
- The "Old Patagonian Express": Chatwin rode the La Trochita steam train. It still runs as a tourist line between Esquel and Nahuel Pan.
In Patagonia isn't a map; it's a mood. It tells you that every place has a layer of myth underneath the dirt. Bruce Chatwin didn't just report on a region; he created a version of it that exists in our heads every time we think about the "end of the world."
If you're planning a trip, read it on the plane. Just don't get too upset if the locals don't recognize the versions of themselves he left behind.
Next Steps for the Curious:
Start by reading the first ten pages—the prose is so lean it’ll make most modern travel blogs look like they’re trying too hard. Then, look up the 1999 biography by Nicholas Shakespeare to see where the real Bruce ends and the legend begins.