Meet World’s loneliest cowboy in Chile

London -  An 81-year-old cowboy has for the past 46 years been living in isolation in Chilean mountains.

Since 1965, Faustino Barrientos has worked as a gaucho - a horse-riding rancher and a shepherd who lived in the southern swath of Chile and Argentina.

His house is made from a salvaged fishing boat.

“I don’t need money. I have enough to eat. Life seems to be better when you’re alone. They want to kick me out of here but they can’t. I’m staying here until the very end,” the Daily Mail

quoted Barrientos as telling Vice, an independent media company in Brooklyn, New York.

He had grown up on the shores of Lake O’Higgins but after his 11 siblings moved away and Pinochet started rising up the ranks of power, he moved to Argentina.

While travelling around the country and working at construction jobs, Barrientos picked up the skills to sustain himself when he returned to the craggy, mountainous Patagonia of Chile.

Lake O’Higgins is one of the most remote areas of Patagonia and is the least populated region in the country and is also one of the world’s most sparsely populated places outside Antarctica.

Barrientos’s land has two buildings, one building is a small hut where he sleeps, eats, listens to the radio and pours over stacks of newspapers when they are delivered to him twice a year.

The other building stores boxes of food - tins of soups and desserts, bags of sugar and flour, tubs of lard that are delivered by a boat that has started to pass his quiet corner every ten

days.The cowboy also survives on cows and sheep that he reared on his land, and he kept track of time with a calendar that he marked off everyday.

Every two years he rid with his cattle for two days to Villa O’Higgins, a small community of several hundred people, 25 miles away. He leads the cattle along ravines and through rivers to the

town. There, he sells his cattle, raising enough money to live his humble lifestyle.

He enjoys a few modern amenities, keeping up on politics and sports scores over a radio in his home and has watched television just once in his life.

“It’s good to know what’s going on out there. [The radio is] how I learn about politics in different countries. That’s also how I taught myself politics,” Barrientos added.