Cascada de las Animas

This guide to Cascada de las Animas in the Cajon del Maipo outside Santiago follows rancher Eduardo Astorga and his wife Eugenia Moreno, who in the early 1990s fought a multinational gas consortium for three years over a pipeline planned across land they had already turned into one of Chile's first ecotourism ventures. It also carries the old story the arrieros, the mule drivers who once worked this canyon, told about spirits bathing in the falling water at dusk. Stand and listen to the waterfall behind you, the one that gave the place its name.