Torres del Paine

The Torres del Paine are three granite peaks, or torres, rising to nearly 2,850 meters in Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia, formed from a body of granite, called the Paine Pluton, that intruded into and slowly cooled beneath overlying sedimentary rock roughly 12 million years ago. Later uplift of the southern Andes exposed the pluton at the surface, and the intense glacial erosion of repeated ice ages carved away the softer surrounding sedimentary rock and sculpted the harder granite into the towers' steep, near-vertical faces, leaving a dark sedimentary cap still visible atop some of the peaks. The towers are considered a classic example of glacially exposed granite batholith topography and give the national park its name, Paine, from a local word for blue, describing the color of the surrounding mountains.