August 30, 2025 — 5:00am
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For a bloke from central Queensland, Matt Oberg speaks pretty bloody good Spanish. I’ve rung a doorbell outside an old timber pea-green cottage on the highest street in a little town at the end of the Earth. Oberg has answered, greeting me in perfect Spanish: “Buenas noches, entre”.
Last Hope Distillery, Puerto Natales Chile.
Then he’s there at the top of the stairs in a smart, button-up shirt with a well-groomed moustache: the star of a bar which looks to me part farmhouse, part speakeasy, complete with chandeliers, a long wooden bar fringed by bottles reaching to the ceiling, and a view out back over endless snow-capped mountains of southern Patagonia.
This bar, Last Hope Distillery, is legendary here in Puerto Natales, gateway to world-famous Torres Del Paine National Park (90 minutes’ drive north). And its owners – Oberg and his Australian partner, Kiera Shiels – are Puerto Natales’ favourite adopted locals.
I’d heard stories all the way back in Australia of travellers adding a day to their Patagonian holiday just to spend an evening here. And when bar staff at my hotel in Santiago, Chile’s capital 3000 kilometres north, hear my Aussie twang, they tell me I have to come.
Matt Oberg and Leila Shiels never did go back to mining.
So here I am. And Oberg’s ordering me a cocktail called Who Shot Tom Collins, a local take on a classic made with their own gin, distilled from local Calafate berries.
“No pisco sours [Chile’s most famous drink] here, mate,” he says with a grin. It’s barely 6pm and the bar’s already buzzing. Patrons are stacked alongside the bar on stools, or they’re standing; others are settled in at tables. “When’s closing time?” I ask. “When everyone feels like going home,” Oberg says.
Part of the thrill of travel is in discovering the endless possibilities the world presents us. Most of us are happy seeing them in passing and then going home. Others, like Oberg and Shiels, change their entire lives for them. And it’s these kinds of traveller tales I find the most fascinating.
I follow Oberg outside. He lives next door with Shiels, their two small girls, and their 15-year-old German shepherd, Linda. From their back steps, you can see the Andes.
Patagonian cool… Last Hope Distillery.
“We never get sick of that view,” Shiels says. “We really do spend an awful amount of time outside just staring.”
Once coal miners working in central Queensland, the couple decided to travel for a year. That was 10 years ago. They fell for the wilderness in this part of Patagonia and the uber-casual manana approach to living.
Then they began working 15-hour days setting up the world’s southernmost distillery. They bought a 100-year-old house, turned the living room into a bar and built a small warehouse in the back for a distillery.
“We came to do the W Hike [in Torres Del Paine] and fell in love with it all,” Oberg says. “Then we realised Puerto Natales was lacking a good, late-night place.”
Last Hope Distillery is legendary in Puerto Natales, gateway to the world-famous Torres Del Paine National Park.
Not content with just running a bar for the first time, they set about producing their own gin, too. “I was a chemical engineer,” Shiels says. “That’s essentially about any liquid that goes through a tube. So maybe you can say there’s a synergy to it.”
Their iconic Calafate gin is made from berries they forage in the mountains outside town. And it’s the pure Patagonian water they credit for that gin’s – and their Dry Gin’s – clean, wholesome taste. They run a free tour each day during high season, and gin-making workshops next door.
Though I’m just as happy to sit and drink. They add new cocktails each month, inspired by local flavours that can’t be found elsewhere.
Gin-making and coal mining have “a certain synergy”.
The bar’s twilight glow, from the light bouncing off all those white mountains outside, is replaced by a darker bar room atmosphere and it’s heaving– not in a crowded, Aussie sports-bar kind of way – bodies pushed together, queues for drinks – but in an easier-going, “she’ll-be-right-mate” South American kind of way.
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Oberg’s working the floor tonight, but the couple found the thrill of 3am finishes dissipated somewhat when the babies came along. Anyway, the point of manana isn’t about working until you reach it, it’s about waiting until tomorrow to bother doing anything at all.
“People dream about coming here for a week’s holiday,” Oberg says. “And we live here. How good’s that?”
TRIP NOTES
FLY
Qantas (qantas.com.au) and LATAM (latamairlines.com) fly from Sydney to Santiago four times a week. From $2500 return, with onward connections with LATAM to Puerto Natales.
DRINK
Last Hope Distillery is open Tuesdays to Saturdays during high season (October to April) and Thursdays to Saturdays during low season (May to August), lasthopedistillery.com
TOUR
Guided By Nature offer seven-day guided tours of the W Hike in Torres Del Paine National Park from $9895 a person, with an overnight stay in Puerto Natales, guidedbynature.com/torres-del-paine-patagonia
The writer travelled courtesy of Guided By Nature.
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Craig Tansley is a Gold Coast-based freelance travel writer with a specialty in adventure, and a background in the South Pacific.Traveller GuidesFrom our partners
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