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The Man Living in Complete Isolation for 40 Years (Part 4/4) | Far Out

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An 81-year-old gaucho has spent more than five decades alone on the edge of Chilean Patagonia, and the outside world is finally catching up to him.

Faustino Barrientos has lived on the remote shores of Lake O’Higgins since 1965, tending livestock and surviving off the land in a house built from the salvaged wreckage of a wooden fishing boat. In December 2011, filmmakers from VICE traveled into this corner of Chilean Patagonia for the fourth and final installment of Far Out, documenting the final stretch of Barrientos’ isolated life and the modern forces beginning to close in on it.

• Barrientos has lived alone by Lake O’Higgins since 1965, in a home built from the wreckage of a shipwrecked wooden fishing boat.
• His nearest human contact is Villa O’Higgins, roughly 25 miles away, reachable only by a two-day horseback ride over rugged mountain animal paths — a trip he makes just once every few years to sell cattle.
• Now 81, Barrientos is confronting the end of his life as government infrastructure, tourism boats, and economic expansion push into the isolated stretch of Patagonia he’s called home for over 45 years.

A Life Built From a Shipwreck

Barrientos’ house isn’t a cabin someone shipped in pieces or hauled by mule — it’s assembled from the timbers of a fishing vessel that wrecked along the shoreline decades ago. There’s no electricity, no running water, no modern conveniences of any kind. He raises cattle and lives off what the land and his herd provide, the same way gauchos in this stretch of Patagonia have worked for generations.

The isolation isn’t accidental or temporary. It’s the deliberate shape of a life he chose in 1965 and never walked back from, even as the decades piled up and the rest of Chile changed around him.

The Two-Day Ride to Villa O’Higgins

Reaching another human being means saddling up for a journey most people would call an expedition. Villa O’Higgins, the nearest settlement with a population in the low hundreds, sits about 25 miles from Barrientos’ home — but there’s no road that gets him there directly. The route runs through rugged mountain animal paths, and the trip takes two full days on horseback.

Barrientos doesn’t make that ride often. According to the documentary, he ventures into town only once every few years, and almost always for the same reason: to sell his cattle. It’s less a commute than a rare pilgrimage, one that underscores just how far removed his daily existence is from anything resembling town life.

Two days on horseback through mountain animal paths — that’s the round trip between Faustino Barrientos and the nearest other human being.

Patagonia Is Closing In

The final chapter of Far Out isn’t just a portrait of solitude — it’s a record of that solitude running out of room. At 81, Barrientos is nearing the end of a life spent almost entirely alone, and the traditional gaucho lifestyle he represents is fading with him. Government infrastructure projects, tourism boat traffic, and broader economic expansion are steadily working their way into the remote pocket of Patagonia he settled into more than 45 years earlier.

VICE’s filmmakers frame his story as a last look at a way of life that’s disappearing on its own terms, not through conquest but through roads, ferries, and development creeping toward a man who never asked for any of it. For anyone drawn to stories of extreme self-sufficiency far from civilization, it sits alongside other documented lives on the fringes — the kind explored in pieces like Survival on the smallest island in the Caribbean or Fishpeople | Lives Transformed by the Sea.

What makes Barrientos’ case distinct is the timeline. He isn’t a recent dropout from modern life testing how long he can last off-grid — he’s been out there since 1965, longer than most of the infrastructure now approaching his shoreline has existed. The tourism boats and government roads aren’t disrupting a temporary experiment; they’re arriving at the tail end of a life that predates them by decades, on a lake most of Chile still can’t easily reach.