On 13 October 1972, Nando Parrado was travelling with members of a Uruguayan rugby team and others when their aircraft crashed high in the Andes on the way to Chile.
The impact left Parrado with a fractured skull. He was unconscious for several days. When he woke, the world he knew had changed. His mother had died in the crash. His younger sister, Susana, was badly injured and later died in his arms. His best friend was also among those lost.
The survivors were stranded at roughly 3,500 metres in a frozen mountain environment with little food, inadequate clothing and no realistic way to call for help. They used parts of the wreckage to protect themselves from the cold and improvised equipment from what they could find. An avalanche later struck the fuselage and killed more of the group.
Days became weeks. Search efforts had been called off. Eventually the survivors understood that waiting for rescue was unlikely to save them.
Parrado became determined to find a way out. After preparing as well as they could, he and Roberto Canessa began walking west across the Andes. They had no proper mountaineering equipment and initially believed civilisation was much closer than it really was. When they climbed a high peak and saw mountains stretching in every direction, the scale of what lay ahead became clear.
They kept walking.
After ten days they encountered Chilean cattle herder Sergio Catalán, who helped raise the alarm. The remaining survivors were rescued after 72 days in the mountains.
The physical survival is extraordinary, but Parrado’s account of what happened afterwards is just as important. Returning home did not simply restore the life he had left behind. His mother and sister were gone. His family home had changed. The ordinary future he had imagined before the crash no longer existed.
Over time, he rebuilt. He worked in the family business, became a businessman, television producer and speaker, married Veronique and had daughters. In reflecting on the Andes, he has repeatedly returned to three things: family, confidence and friendship.
Before the crash, studies, work and material concerns occupied much of his mind. In the mountains, those things became meaningless. What remained was the need to love, to be loved, to trust other people and to make decisions when certainty did not exist.
The Ambassador’s Reflection
This is the part of Nando’s story that stays with me. It should not take a mountain, an accident or the loss of people we love for us to discover what was important all along.
We spend enormous amounts of our lives worrying about contracts, money, status, work, messages, arguments and things that feel urgent because they are directly in front of us. Nando had all of that stripped away. What remained was family, friendship and the next decision.
He also learned something about choice. Standing on a mountain and seeing nothing but more mountains, he and Roberto could not wait for a perfect answer. They chose a direction and walked. Many decisions in ordinary life are nowhere near as final as the decisions they had to make in the Andes, yet fear can make them feel impossible.
Perhaps wisdom is not simply knowing what matters. Perhaps wisdom is living as though we actually believe it matters, before life has to take everything else away to teach us.
