‘Oh, everyone here knows about Florence,’ says trekking guide Gonzalo Koo, pausing to lean on his walking poles. ‘As the first tourist here, she is like the Virgin Mary in Patagonia.’ We have spent the morning meandering through beech forests in Chile’s Última Esperanza (‘Last Hope’) province, skirting the cave where Eberhard found his giant sloth, and clambering up towards mountain peaks shining with fresh snow. Austral parakeets and Chilean flicker birds have been constantly annoyed by our presence, flailing up from their nests in screeches of irritation as we pass.

After a couple of hours, we emerge from the foothills and onto a broad plateau. ‘Maybe Florence wasn’t here on this exact spot,’ says Gonzalo, ‘but she would have passed through this valley.’ He gestures at the landscape 900 metres beneath us. Autumn is newly arrived in the southern hemisphere, and Patagonia looks on fire, the grasslands glowing russet and the forests flaming red and amber. The rivers tracing the valley floor are so far below us they look like single strands of cotton. It is the land of a fantasy, through which the heroine must traverse to claim her prize.

A movement catches Gonzalo’s eye, and we have our own prize for the day’s efforts: condors. Far below, a pair glides along the glittering tongue of Lago Sofia as it slinks towards the Andes. More appear, wheeling in from the left, swooping up from the right. ‘It’s like a highway of wind here,’ says Gonzalo, lying on the rocks and peering over the plateau edge. ‘They’re looking for a thermal so they can get back to their nests.’

As we turn to hike down the mountain, we’re distracted by a noise behind us: the wump-wump-wump of a condor on a flight path that takes it just metres over our heads. I feel, as Florence described on her first condor encounter, ‘the air shake as it went, and almost touching me with the tip of its mighty wing’ – a moment that inspired such reverent awe in her party that Florence’s husband promptly pulled out a rifle and shot it out of the sky. For an instant, the condor looks straight down at me, and I look straight up at it, and then we’re both on our way.

It is a drive of several hours across Last Hope Province to Patagonia’s star attraction – Torres del Paine National Park. With low, dark clouds bumping across moss-coloured hills and a soft wind corrugating the surface of every lake, it is a pleasantly reassuring landscape, and one that may well have reminded Florence of Scotland.

There is one small distinction though. Just occasionally, those clouds lift and give a glimpse of the mountains that draw so many visitors here, like the curtain rising on the most extravagant stage set. The Cordilleras tower above the hills, their peaks spiky and mysterious, their crevasses lost in shadow. It is never anything other than an astonishing surprise when they are revealed. In those few moments, the peaks dominate the attention of every single person in the park. Hikers break from the path and crane their necks upwards. Horse-riders bring their animals to a stop and gawp. Guests lazing in their hotel rooms immediately dash outside with their cameras. And then the clouds drift in once more, and everyone resumes their business.

In the case of Juan Toro, that business is running Torres del Paine. The park’s first ranger, he arrived in 1977 and was due to retire last year – but he can’t quite give up the job. I interrupt him in his cabin in the north of the park as he sits down for a lunch of chocolate-spread sandwiches. Through his kitchen window is a view of Dixie Island amid the turquoise waters of Laguna Azul. On a clear day, Juan says, there are terrific views of Cleopatra’s Needles, too, the three pinnacles named by Florence when she passed this way 140 years ago.

During his early days here, he shared more than just the views with Florence. Like hers, his existence was entirely hand to mouth. ‘It was an interesting time to be a ranger,’ he says, plonking himself onto a sofa. ‘I had to dig out paths by hand, and crack frozen streams to get drinking water.’ He cheerfully recalls the time a puma attacked a human, and he arrived to find the man’s scalp removed and torso eaten. ‘This place is still a gift of nature,’ he says, with no irony, ‘and the wildlife is just the best thing here.’

In an area so vast and with so few human inhabitants, that wildlife is everywhere. Large, angular hares scatter in the fields at the slightest fright. Enormous caracara birds hulk on fence posts and scout for prey. Plump, glossy Patagonian foxes poke through the dry grass looking for mice and insects. Flightless rheas bob across the plains, breaking into comical Road Runner-like sprints at the first sniff of danger.

And everywhere, there are guanacos. The llama-like creatures stand sentry on misty hilltops or gather in groups to nibble at the grass, staring dolefully at us as we pass. (Perhaps they’re dredging up a deep ancestral memory of our predecessor Florence, who concluded that ‘a better broth cannot be concocted than that obtained from a guanaco head, with the addition of rice, dried vegetables, chilis, etc’.)

‘They are always looking out for danger,’ says Negra Romera. We have left Juan and are driving south on one of the gravel tracks that wind through the park. A design student from the Chilean capital Santiago, Negra has worked as a guide in the Torres del Paine for a couple of years, and suspects she’ll never go back to the city.

We pull over by the side of the road to watch a herd of guanaco gathered on a ridge. They seem unsettled, their nostrils twitching in the air. Negra scours the landscape, looking for the source of their concern. ‘Oh look,’ she exclaims, pointing at a nearby calafate bush. ‘I think there is a fox in there.’ A dark shape emerges and slinks up the slope.

It is very much not a fox. It is a puma.

The guanacos shriek and make a run for the hills, their screams audible long after they’ve disappeared. The game is up for the puma: they saw him too soon. He casts a long look in our direction and pads off. There are estimated to be only 60 pumas in a park of almost 1,000 square miles, and we are giddy at the prospect of a second look; the decision to follow on foot is not one we mull over for too long.

Keeping a safe distance between him and us, however, means we have soon lost him. Standing at Lago Sarmiento, we scan the hilltops with our binoculars, believing him long gone. But, suddenly, there he is – standing on the shore, and much, much closer than we’d expected. His body tenses, he crouches low to the ground, and he comes towards us, orange eyes fixed on our startled ones. Just as I start to calculate how quickly I can make it back to the vehicle (can I at least run faster than Negra?), the puma relaxes and stops. He ambles off, turning every so often to check up on us. We follow him through the binoculars until he is a speck in the lens. ‘It never gets boring in the Torres del Paine,’ whispers Negra with a slightly nervous laugh. ‘Every day is a surprise.’

‘That, a puma. And that, a puma. Over there, a puma.’ Victor Sharp is making his way through fields spotted with pampas grass, pointing out the bloody, stripped skeletons of his sheep. Some are trampled into the ground, others are flung into the branches of low trees – all of them victims of a cat, likely using the flock to teach her cubs how to hunt. ‘The farmer is no friend of the puma,’ says Victor with a scowl.

Victor and his father, Victor Senior, can be found most days on their family’s farm, Estancia La Criollita, right on the Argentine border, in the shadow of the Sierra Baguales mountain range. By Patagonian standards, it’s a smallholding – just 6,000 hectares. ‘Compared to a proper ranch,’ says Victor, ‘it’s a bit crap.’

It seems anything but. From his red corrugated farmhouse, his land stretches on and on in every direction. To the west, the peaks of Torres del Paine are dimples on the horizon. To the east are plains, canyons and mountains, and then more plains, canyons and mountains – all of it belonging to the estancia. ‘The nearest cell signal is three kilometres that way,’ Victor says, waving his hand across tufty grassland coated white by an early frost. ‘My nearest neighbour an hour by horseback that way.’

Victor and Victor Senior tend to 1,500 sheep, 60 horses and 40 dogs here. Today, the sheep are due to be gathered from the estate and herded into the farm’s corral for a pre-winter check and a quick shave to keep the wool out of their faces. It is one of the few times of the year they’re brought in; largely, the animals are left free to roam.

The horses are saddled up and the dogs, sensing that adventure is afoot, are delirious with anticipation in their kennels. There is just time for Victor to have one last cigarette and a bowl of bitter maté tea before the day’s work begins. He nods at the valley sweeping away from us. ‘When I read Florence Dixie’s book, I imagined her in a landscape like this.’

Victor believes she would have come this way from Torres del Paine, passing directly through his ranch. ‘What she did, for a woman in that moment, coming from the other side of the world, is impressive,’ he says. ‘But really I was more interested in how she was with her horses than anything.’

Victor first got on a horse aged seven, and hasn’t spent a single day away from one since. While his skills suggest otherwise, he modestly dismisses the idea that he might be a gaucho – the South American men so famed for their horsemanship that Florence enlisted a couple for her expedition. He certainly looks every inch the real deal, with baggy trousers, wide belt, floppy beret and leather boots. ‘To be a true gaucho,’ he says, ‘is not just about the horses. It is about how we live, how we go about things, how we help each other out.’

Whispering into the ear of his favourite horse, a resplendent white fellow called Pichi, he quickly mounts and steers him out of the pen. He heads off towards the mountains, 10 horses trotting ahead of him and several dogs tearing about in an absolute frenzy of excitement. He is soon out of sight.

Victor Senior and I follow on foot. When the sheep are brought into the fields closest to the farm, it is our job to shut the gates behind them. Until then, we must wait. The shadows of the Sierra Baguales have been slowly creeping up the plains with the rising sun before we hear the first whistle, and, squinting, spy a white line wiggling through the hills. Victor’s shouts, in Spanish, reach us over the valley, furiously urging the flock on. ‘I cannot repeat to you what words he uses,’ says his father with a smile.

In no time, several hundred sheep are upon us. Victor circles on Pichi, the horse’s hide now splattered in mud, and calls to his dogs. They in turn race around the flock, dive into the melee of animals and back out again, waiting for their next instruction.

It’s several more hours before the flock is delivered to the corral for the night, all the gates have been closed, the horses brushed, and the dogs fed. ‘This is how it is when you have animals,’ says Victor, ready to be fed himself. ‘You look after them and then you look after yourself.’

With the smell of roasting lamb wafting from the kitchen, we sit outside the farm and watch the sun disappear behind the Torres del Paine. A skunk bumbles merrily past the sheep pens and terrifies a snoozing cat. Victor Senior calls us in for food just as the sun disappears for good, and the only light for miles around is from the stars above. It is not a scene much changed from the one that drew Florence from the other side of the world all those years ago.

‘It is always the same,’ says Victor. ‘It is good to be so far away from everything.’ He stubs out a cigarette, takes off his boots, and wanders inside for his dinner.