Southern Chilean Patagonia

Chilean Patagonia may traditionally claim the bottom half of Chile, but the spirit of the region resides in the southernmost province of Magallanes (in honor of 16th-century conquistador Hernando de Magallanes), the waterway of Seno Última Esperanza ("Last Hope Sound"), and the infamous misnomer Tierra del Fuego ("Land of Fire"). It's one of the least inhabited areas in South America, physically cut off from by the rest of the continent by two vast ice caps and the Strait of Magellan. The only links with the north are via air or water—or through Argentina. It's amidst this seclusion that you will find the daunting rocky spires of Torres del Paine, horseback sheep-wrangling gauchos, islands inhabited solely by elephant seals and penguin colonies, and the austere landscapes that captivated everyone from Charles Darwin to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Navigating the channel that today bears his name, conquistador Hernando de Magallanes arrived on these shores in 1520, claiming the region for Spain. Although early attempts at colonization failed, the forbidding landscape continued to fascinate explorers. Naturalist Charles Darwin, who sailed through the Estrecho de Magallanes (Strait of Magellan) in 1833 and 1834, called it a "mountainous land, partly submerged in the sea, so that deep inlets and bays occupy the place where valleys should exist."

The newly formed nation of Chile showed little interest in Patagonia until 1843, when other countries began to eye the region, and Chilean President Manuel Bulnes sent down a ragtag group of soldiers to claim some of it for Chile. Five years later the town of Punta Arenas was founded.

Shortly thereafter, Punta Arenas became a major stop on the trade route around the tip of South America. Steam navigation intensified the city's commercial importance, leading to its short-lived age of splendor from 1892 to 1914, when its population rose from approximately 2,000 to 20,000. The opening of the Panama Canal all but bumped Punta Arenas off the map, and you will still hear Chileans down here bemoaning the loss of shipping. By 1920 many of the founding families had decided to move on, leaving behind the lavish mansions and the impressive public buildings they'd built.

North from Punta Arenas the land is flat and vast; this terrain gave rise to the book of poems Desolation by Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. The road peters out to the north at Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, where snow-covered pillars of stone seem to rise vertically from the plains below. To the east, across the Argentine border, is the only glacier in the world that is still growing after 30,000 years—Glaciar Perito Moreno, one of Argentina's national landmarks. To the south is Tierra del Fuego, the storm-lashed island at the continent's southernmost tip. This bleak wilderness, which still calls out to explorers today, is literally the end of the Earth.

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