🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego is the only Argentine national park with a marine coastline and the southernmost in the country. It covers some 68,900 hectares of Andean-Patagonian forest, peat bogs, lakes, rivers and the shore of the Beagle Channel, about 12 km west of Ushuaia. Created in 1960, it protects the southern tip of the Andes and the ecosystems of the end of the world.
It is one of the great icons of Ushuaia: this is where the legendary National Route 3 ends, at Bahía Lapataia, 3,063 km south of Buenos Aires. You walk trails through lenga, ñire and guindo trees, spot beaver dams (introduced and now a problem), and see upland geese, Magellanic woodpeckers and, along the shore, seabirds, all framed by mountains and the presence of the Beagle Channel.
This guide covers the essentials for a visit: how to get there from Ushuaia, the main trails and viewpoints, the End of the World Train that runs into the park, current entrance fees, boat trips in the area and practical advice on weather, tickets and seasons. It is a must for anyone who makes it to the southern tip of the continent.
The area was home to the Yámana (Yagán), the canoe people of the Beagle Channel, for thousands of years. After colonisation and the founding of the Ushuaia prison (whose inmates built the railway that is today the End of the World Train), the area was protected as a national park in 1960, making it the southernmost in Argentina. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The end of the world: the southernmost province, land of the Selk'nam and the Yámana, of the Ushuaia prison and its train, of channels, glaciers and subantarctic forest, with its gaze set on the Malvinas and Antarctica.
Read the history of Tierra del Fuego →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Did you know the name of this land was born from a campfire? When Magellan's expedition crossed the strait in 1520, the sailors saw dozens of fires burning along the shore: they were the campfires of the Yámana, who kept them alight day and night to survive the extreme cold, even paddling naked in bark canoes in the depths of the southern winter. Hence «Tierra del Fuego», land of fire. Today, anyone walking the park's Senda Costera is literally treading the same shoreline where those people lived for thousands of years.
Long before the park existed, the shores of the Beagle Channel were inhabited for millennia by the Yámana (also called Yagán), one of the southernmost canoe peoples on the planet. Together with the Selk'nam (Ona) of the interior and the Kawésqar and Haush, they made up the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego, adapted to one of the harshest climates on Earth.
The Yámana were exceptional navigators: they travelled the Fuegian channels in bark canoes, kept a fire burning on board (part of the reason European sailors named it 'Tierra del Fuego' when they saw the fires from the sea) and lived off fishing, hunting sea lions and gathering shellfish. Along what is now the park's Senda Costera you can still find 'concheros', mounds of shells built up over generations, a silent record of that ancient presence.
The arrival of Europeans, missionaries and settlers in the 19th century brought disease and displacement that tragically decimated these peoples within a few decades. Today, Yámana memory is an essential part of the story of the park and of the far Fuegian south, and the coastal archaeological sites remember those who were the true first inhabitants of this land.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Argentine state pushed the settlement of the far south by installing a prison in Ushuaia for repeat offenders and dangerous convicts. The jail at the end of the world, formally opened in the early 20th century, became the economic and demographic engine of the fledgling town: the inmates were the labour force that built its buildings, roads and public works.
One of the most characteristic tasks was logging firewood in the nearby forests. To haul it to town, the convicts built and ran a narrow-gauge railway that ran into the Pipo river valley, inside what is today the national park. That 'convicts' train' operated for decades, tied to the life of the prison.
The prison closed in the mid-20th century, but its legacy is written into the landscape and into Fuegian history. The old rail line was later recovered as a tourist attraction: today's End of the World Train covers part of that historic route, letting visitors glimpse this harsh chapter of Patagonian settlement while crossing the park's forests.
Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego was created by law in 1960, with the aim of protecting the southern edge of the Andean-Patagonian forest and the coastal ecosystems of the Beagle Channel. It is the only Argentine national park that combines sub-Antarctic forest, peat bogs, mountains and marine shoreline, and the southernmost in the country's whole system of protected areas.
Its territory covers close to 69,000 hectares, of which only a portion is open to public use; the rest is kept as a strict reserve for conservation. The park protects emblematic Fuegian plants such as the lenga, the ñire and the guindo (Magellan's coihue), and wildlife such as the upland goose, the Magellanic woodpecker, the Fuegian culpeo fox and a range of seabirds and shorebirds.
One of the park's great conservation challenges is the Canadian beaver, introduced to the island in 1946 for the fur trade. With no natural predators, the beavers multiplied, and their dams flood and kill large stretches of forest, profoundly altering the rivers. Managing this invasive species is now one of Tierra del Fuego's environmental priorities, and its traces are visible on several park trails, such as the Paseo de la Castorera.
The name 'Tierra del Fuego' was born in 1520, when Ferdinand Magellan's expedition sighted, from the strait that now bears his name, the many fires the indigenous peoples kept burning along the shore. The sailors first called it 'Tierra de los Humos', land of smoke, and then 'Tierra del Fuego', a name that would stay forever attached to this archipelago at the southern tip of the Americas.
For centuries the region was feared and barely known to Europeans, a place of wild seas and inhospitable weather. In the 19th century, the British scientific expeditions aboard HMS Beagle — which gives its name to the channel bordering the park — charted these coasts. On the Beagle's second voyage, between 1831 and 1836, a young naturalist named Charles Darwin took part, and his observations of the Fuegian peoples and of the region's nature would deeply shape his later thinking.
Anglican missionaries came next and, towards the end of the 19th century, the Argentine and Chilean states, which divided the island between them. The founding of the mission and then of Ushuaia, the building of the prison and the wave of settlement transformed the region for good. The Beagle Channel, the English place names and the memory of those explorations are still present in the landscape of the park, which keeps the remote, overwhelming character that struck the first navigators.
Visiting Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego today means walking, without quite realising it, through several layers of history stacked on top of each other. The most photographed spot, Bahía Lapataia, is not only the geographic end of National Route 3 — 3,063 km from Buenos Aires — but also, centuries back, a Yámana settlement site: the concheros you see along the Senda Costera are archaeological middens thousands of years old, formed by generations who discarded there the shells of the shellfish they ate.
Walking the Senda Costera, some 8 km between Bahía Ensenada and Lapataia, takes 3 to 4 hours through lenga and guindo forest, shell beaches and small bays where seabirds nest. Along with the climb up Cerro Guanaco — a full day of demanding trekking with views over Lago Roca (Acigami), the Beagle Channel and the Chilean border — it is the most complete way to understand why this landscape was at once a refuge for indigenous peoples, a sentence for convicts and today a destination for thousands of visitors a year.
The End of the World Train closes the historical circle: it runs along part of the original line the inmates of the Ushuaia prison used to haul firewood out of the Pipo river valley in the early 20th century. What began as a route of forced labour is now a tourist ride of about 50 minutes each way, with guides telling that story as the train moves through the same forest the convicts saw more than a hundred years ago. Few experiences in Argentina pack so much — indigenous peoples, European exploration, state punishment and environmental conservation — into a space so small and so remote.