Discover Chile and Easter Island. Includes FREE planning and background information. ‘In those far-away places,’ writes pioneer Lucas Bridges about Tierra del Fuego, ‘a patient was either dead or better by the time the doctor arrives.’ That was 1947. Fast-forward to today and this hooked isle punctuating Patagonia’s tail is no longer so desperately secluded, yet it sustains its end-of-the-world allure. Virgin it was. Less than a century after its original peoples perished, petroleum has been discovered, resorts and fishing lodges have appeared and the eastern seaboard has been paved. But the immense Fuegian wilderness, with its slate-gray seascapes, murky crimson bogs and wind-worn forests, endures as awesome and irritable as it had been in the days of Bridges. Split down the middle between Chile and Argentina, the remote Chilean side consists of hardscrabble outposts, lonely sheep ranches, and a roadless expanse of woods, lakes and nameless mountains. Porvenir, a former gold mining post, is the provincial capital. In contrast, the Argentine half buzzes with tourism and industry. Adventure hub Ushuaia sits within arm’s reach of ski resorts and the daunting Darwin Range. The Beagle Channel separates Tierra del Fuego from Chile’s Isla Navarino and uninhabited groups of islands that peter out at Cabo de Hornos, the southern terminus of the Americas.
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