Since 2003, a monitoring program has been conducted on several glaciers and glacierets in the Pascua-Lama region of the Chilean Andes (29° S/70° W; 5000 m a.s.l.), permitting the study of glaciological processes on ice-bodies in a subtropical, arid, high-elevation area where no measurements were previously available. In this paper we present: (i) 6 years of glaciological surface mass-balance measurements from 4 ice-bodies in the area, including a discussion of the nature of the studied glaciers and glacierets and characterization of the importance of winter mass-balance to annual mass-balance variability; and (ii) changes in surface-area of 20 ice-bodies in the region since 1955, reconstructed from aerial photographs and satellite images, which show that ice-bodies have lost 44 ± 21% of their 1955 surface-area, and that the rate of surface-area shrinkage increased in the late 20th century. From these datasets we present an interpretation of inter-decadal glacier changes, which appear to be linked to El Niño Southern Oscillation and to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.