Cecilia Durán Gafo had trained as an early childhood educator and later ran a family hotel in Puerto Natales. Nothing prepared her for what she saw in 2010, when some 90 king penguins arrived at Bahía Inútil, in Tierra del Fuego, and people began touching them, feeding them, and even capturing them. Of that group, only eight survived.
Cecilia decided to intervene. Together with marine biologist Alejandro Kusch, she set up a day-and-night monitoring system to keep away curious onlookers and collectors looking for eggs. In 2011, the King Penguin project was officially established, and in 2013 the first chicks arrived under protection. By 2015, the first of them was already independent.
The threat never disappeared completely: between 2019 and 2021, they had to deal with predation by the gray fox, and cameras and GPS were added to monitor the birds. Today, with 72-year-old Cecilia still involved with the reserve, the colony numbers around 200 penguins. From eight to nearly two hundred, in 16 years, thanks to a woman who one day decided that these birds deserved to stay.
