🏔️ Torres del Paine, Twice: A Sunrise Flight and a Patagonia in Miniature

Torres del Paine is the postcard of Patagonia: three granite towers, the two-toned horns of the Cuernos, turquoise lakes, a glacier calving icebergs into a grey lake, and a wind that can knock you off your feet. I wanted to fly over it. So this one comes two ways. First a real flight, rendered with forge3d from satellite data at sunrise. Then a little tilt-and-spin model of the whole park for my diorama viewer, with icebergs, condors, hikers on the trail, and a button for the wind.

The flight

It starts at the south end of Lago Grey, low over the water, and runs up the lake past the icebergs to the face of the Grey Glacier. Then it turns east past Paine Grande, crosses Lago Pehoé to the Cuernos, slips up the Valle del Francés between them, climbs over the Cuernos to the Torres, and swings south to finish on the whole massif across Lago Nordenskjöld. The sun is placed for a February morning a little after sunrise, low in the east, so the light comes from behind you at the end.

The diorama

The second half is a model you can spin. It’s the same diorama engine as my Zermatt, Amalfi and Yosemite boards, pointed at the far south. The ground comes from the Copernicus elevation model, and everything on it from OpenStreetMap: 88 lakes, the rivers, the trails, the refugios and campgrounds, and the glaciers. On top of that the code adds Patagonian life: icebergs on Lago Grey, Andean condors circling in the thermals over the Torres, the Cuernos and Paine Grande, hikers in bright jackets walking the trails, and the refugios lighting up after dark.

Try it

Drag to spin, scroll to zoom, and tilt it down to the lakes. Fly to takes you to the Cuernos across Lago Pehoé, the Torres, the Valle del Francés, Paine Grande, the Grey Glacier and its icebergs, Salto Grande and Lago Nordenskjöld. Under Ride along you can hike the W with the hikers or soar with a condor. Switch Summer off to turn the clock to late April, when the lenga forests go red and the snow comes down the peaks, and the Patagonian wind switch does what you’d expect.

The towers and the horns

The park takes its name from the Torres, three granite towers about 2,250 to 2,500 m high at the top of the Ascencio valley. The hike up to the lake at their foot, the Base de las Torres, is the most famous day in the park, and a lot of people do it in the dark to be there when the first sun turns the towers orange. In the diorama the climbers on the towers have headlamps on before dawn. Just south are the Cuernos, “the horns”, pale granite peaks with dark tops that look as if they were dipped in chocolate.

Lakes, steppe and lenga

Below the peaks the park is two different worlds. To the west and up the valleys there are forests of lenga, a southern beech, which stop at a sharp treeline somewhere around 800 to 1,000 m. To the east it opens out into golden Patagonian steppe of tussock grass and thorny scrub, with guanacos and the odd puma. The lakes between them come in every shade from milky grey to turquoise to deep blue, depending on how much glacier flour is in the water. Lago Pehoé and Lago Nordenskjöld are the famous turquoise ones, joined by a short stretch of the Paine River and the waterfall of Salto Grande.

How it’s made

The flight is built the same way as my Icefields Parkway flyover. The terrain is the Copernicus GLO-30 elevation model, resampled to a 20 m grid, and the ground color is a single Sentinel-2 satellite pass from March 22, 2026, which turned out to be almost perfectly clear, a small miracle in Patagonia. A little Python grades the imagery, fills the lakes with their own color, and turns the steepest faces to bare granite where the satellite, looking straight down, had smeared the snow from the summits down the walls. The camera path is a smooth curve through eleven keyframes, and forge3d renders each frame on GitHub’s computers with no graphics card, using software Vulkan, split across 30 machines.

One fun problem along the way: the painted dawn sky kept leaving a pale band along the skyline wherever the renderer’s own sky turned creamy near the low sun. The fix was to work out where the sky must be from the terrain itself, by projecting every elevation cell through the camera and keeping the highest one in each column of the frame.

The diorama uses the seattle-diorama code with a new Patagonian ground mode, steppe below and lenga on the sheltered slopes, plus the icebergs, condors, hikers and wind. As always I built it with Claude: I brought the wish list and Claude wrote the code. Both halves live in the same repository.

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