🍃Sustainability Experiences: next to the edge of the world...

Hi everyone 🖐,

Happy New Year! I hope you had an opportunity to recharge over the holidays. I just spent a few weeks in Argentina so I wanted to start the year with a story about a model of sustainability in operations, hospitality and farming called Bahia Bustamante lodge, which I visited while there. I will rely heavily on pictures to tell this story as I think pictures will best convey the information, will ease you into your 2023 😊 and hopefully transport you to this special place in Patagonia!

First about the location: to get there, you have to go through the Patagonia’s steppe which feels like an endless expanse in the south of Argentina. The lodge is by the Atlantic ocean so you also are exposed to marine ecosystems teeming with bird life. The property is part of the ´Patagonia Austral´ National Park & ´Blue Patagonia´ UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It is also an Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs).

The lodge has implemented several sustainability practices partly out of necessity given its remoteness and partly because of a deep-rooted belief in a balanced coexistence between humans and nature. The property relies almost exclusively on green energy, particularly solar, for the lodge and their infrastructure. For instance, their two lighthouses run on solar energy. One of them has become the home of a nesting pair of crested caracaras.

Since 2009, they have applied a regenerative approach to agriculture in their 40k hectares of land. That has meant that they limited their merino-wool-producing sheep population to 10k and rotate them periodically to minimize the areas that are over grazed. They also conduct specific interventions to recover certain areas including leaving them completely without sheep. They only interact with the sheep 3 times a year, so the sheep felt almost like one of the wildlife species to spot on the Patagonian plains.

They monitor the land through satellite imagery and on-the-ground surveys to determine the health of the steppe in the property and distribute the sheep accordingly. This holistic management of grasslands approach has allowed plant biodiversity to replenish as plant species that would have been eaten from overgrazing, now have a change to grow such as this beautiful plant species.

This allows other animal species to easily coexist with the sheep so you are likely to spot a number of species on land throughout the property, particularly guanacos and lesser rheas.

In the lodge restaurant, they rely almost exclusively on ingredients found in the property and a small garden that they started. Therefore, it is likely that you will try tastes and textures that you have never experienced before, like this dish made with local algae.

The shampoo and soap offered in the room are biodegradable, which I have seen in other ecolodges. For me, this always raises the question of why consumer products everywhere are not completely or more biodegradable when their remains are also going down the drain and into our lands, rivers and oceans.

You are only allowed to visit most of the property’s grounds and marine coast with a guide to avoid disturbance to the environment. This results in more limited but also more intimate encounters with wildlife such as Magellanic penguins. This species has a couple of small colonies on the property including a location they call Penguin island.

These and other sustainable practices that I probably did not even notice, make this feel like a complete experience – one where you immerse yourself in nature but also see practices that ensure our balanced coexistence with it. Here you see me learning about the Patagonia’s steppe from Bahia Bustamante’s owner Matias Soriano.

I hope that this gives you some inspiration to start the year and encourages you to apply more sustainable practices in your personal and business lives in 2023! 😊. Warm regards / saludos, Julio (Note: all pictures are my own)