1. Introduction Highly-resolved pollen and charcoal records from western Patagonia (38e52 S) are a prerequisite to assess the impact of climatic and disturbance regime shifts on the rainforest vegetation at centennial and millennial timescales. Although several studies in this region have examined the long-term influence of climate variables such as temperature and precipitation, only a few have enough detail to resolve millennial-scale changes in moisture balance associated with variations in the position/intensity of the Southern Westerly Winds (SWW) through the Last Glacial termination and the Holocene (Huber et al., 2004; Whitlock et al., 2007; Moreno et al., 2010). None of those, however, have explicitly examined the impact of disturbances driven by volcanic and paleofire activity on the structure and composition of the vegetation despite the abundance of active volcanic centres in the Andes. Such endeavour requires distinguishing between local and regional volcanic, vegetation and paleofire signals to identify the disturbance agent(s) behind divergences among sites at the landscape level.