🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Ushuaia is, quite simply, the end of the world: the southernmost city in Argentina, wedged between the Beagle Channel and the snowy peaks of the Martial mountains, at the southern tip of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. Geography rules here. The city climbs the mountainside looking out over the channel, summer days stretch almost to midnight and winter covers it in snow. It is a cruise port, the gateway to Antarctica and the base for some of the most striking nature experiences in the country.
The name comes from the Yámana (Yaghan) language: 'Ushuaia' is usually translated as 'bay that runs deep towards the west' or 'inner harbor to the west', a reference to the shape of the bay on the Beagle. Long before the city, these shores and forests were the territory of the Indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego: the Yámana, canoe people of the channel, and the Selk'nam (Ona), hunters of the interior, whose tragic history is burned into this place. Onto that land came the Anglican missionaries, Argentine sovereignty and the famous prison at the end of the world.
Today Ushuaia combines that intense past with nature that leaves you speechless. You can sail the Beagle Channel to the Les Eclaireurs lighthouse and the Isla Martillo penguin colony; drive through Tierra del Fuego National Park to Bahía Lapataia, where the legendary National Route 3 ends; ride the historic End of the World Train, heir to the prisoners' train; visit the former prison turned museum; and try king crab and Fuegian lamb facing the sea. End of the world, beginning of everything: the phrase is worn out, but it still holds.
Long before the city, Tierra del Fuego was inhabited for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples: the Yámana or Yaghan, canoe people who lived on the shores and islands of the Beagle Channel, and the Selk'nam (Ona), nomadic hunters of the interior who followed the guanaco, along with the Haush in the southeast and the Kawésqar (Alacaluf) further west. The name 'Ushuaia' comes from Yámana and is usually translated as 'bay that runs deep towards the west'. The first European to sail these waters was Ferdinand Magellan (1520), who named it the 'Land of Fires' after the natives' bonfires; later HMS Beagle, with Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin on board, explored the channel that now bears the ship's name (the 1830s). In the second half of the 19th century came the Anglican missionaries of the South American Missionary Society: in 1869 Bishop Waite Hockin Stirling settled in the bay and in 1871 the Reverend Thomas Bridges founded the Anglican Mission there, living alongside the Yámana and compiling a famous Yaghan-English dictionary. On 12 October 1884 the Expeditionary Division commanded by Augusto Lasserre lowered the mission's British flag and raised the Argentine one, founding the Subprefecture and consolidating Argentine sovereignty over Tierra del Fuego; that day is taken as the founding of Ushuaia. In the early 20th century the city became associated with punishment: the state built a prison for repeat offenders and dangerous convicts (finished around 1920), the 'jail at the end of the world', where the geography itself served as a wall. The prisoners built much of the city and a railway to bring firewood from the forest: the 'prisoners' train', revived today as the End of the World Train. The prison closed in 1947. Meanwhile the diseases brought by settlers, the arrival of sheep estancias and outright persecution almost wiped out the Indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego within a few decades, a genocide only recognized today. In 1960 Tierra del Fuego National Park was created. Over time, the industrial incentive scheme, the port and, above all, nature tourism and its status as gateway to Antarctica turned Ushuaia into the thriving city at the end of the world that it is now. 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.
Long before the city existed, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego was inhabited for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples perfectly adapted to one of the most extreme climates on the planet. On the shores and islands of the Beagle Channel lived the Yámana or Yaghan, a canoe people who moved about in bark craft, kept a fire burning at all times — even inside the canoes — and lived off shellfish, fish, sea lions and birds. Their astonishing resistance to cold, almost naked in freezing water, left European explorers dumbfounded.
Inland, by contrast, lived the Selk'nam or Ona, nomadic land hunters who pursued guanaco with bow and arrow and whose bodies painted for ceremonies such as the Hain became one of the most recognizable images of Patagonia. To the southeast, neighbors of the Selk'nam, lived the Haush (Mánekenk), and to the west, in the Chilean channels, the Kawésqar or Alacaluf, also canoe people. They were peaceful peoples with ancient mythologies and rituals, unfairly presented as 'savages' by the colonial gaze.
The city's own name comes from the Yámana language. 'Ushuaia' is usually translated as 'bay that runs deep towards the west' or 'inner harbor to the west', a reference to the shape of the bay pushing westwards off the Beagle Channel. It is a beautiful and little-remembered detail: the southernmost city in Argentina carries the name given to it by the people who lived there long before any European.
The first European to cross these waters was Ferdinand Magellan, who in 1520 sailed the strait that now bears his name and christened the region the 'Land of Fires' after the many bonfires the Indigenous peoples lit along the shores. But the name of the channel Ushuaia sits on came later: HMS Beagle, a British Royal Navy ship, explored these channels in the 1830s under Robert FitzRoy, carrying on board a young naturalist named Charles Darwin, whose Fuegian observations left their mark on his work.
In the mid-19th century came the other great protagonist: the South American Missionary Society, an Anglican missionary body set on evangelising the Fuegian peoples. After earlier tragic attempts, in 1869 Bishop Waite Hockin Stirling settled in the bay of Ushuaia, living alongside the Yámana. And in 1871 the Reverend Thomas Bridges formally founded the Anglican Mission of Ushuaia, becoming, with his family, the first European family permanently settled in Tierra del Fuego.
Bridges is a key figure: he learned the Yámana language and compiled an extraordinary Yaghan-English dictionary with thousands of words, saving for ever a good part of a culture that was about to disappear. His son Lucas Bridges later wrote 'Uttermost Part of the Earth', a fundamental account of the Indigenous peoples. The Bridges family then founded Estancia Harberton (1886), the oldest in Tierra del Fuego, which can be visited today. In practice the Mission was the first stable settlement of what would become Ushuaia.
The presence of the Anglican Mission, flying a British flag, in a territory Argentina and Chile had only just finished dividing up under the 1881 Boundary Treaty, set off alarms in Buenos Aires. Argentina needed to make its sovereignty over Tierra del Fuego effective in a remote, disputed territory, still marked by the tensions stemming from the Malvinas question.
In September 1884 the Argentine Navy put Commodore Augusto Lasserre in command of the South Atlantic Expeditionary Division, a fleet of several ships bound for Tierra del Fuego and Isla de los Estados. Lasserre landed in the bay of Ushuaia and found there the Reverend Thomas Bridges with the Anglican Mission and some 350 Yámana. After talking with Bridges, on 12 October 1884 the mission's British flag was lowered and the Argentine flag was raised in the area for the first time, in a ceremony carried out on friendly terms and accepted by the mission's inhabitants.
That same day the Subprefecture was founded, under the Navy, and Ushuaia was established as the seat of the new National Territory of Tierra del Fuego. That is why 12 October 1884 is taken as the founding date of the city. Lasserre ordered public buildings to be built and set up navigation beacons. That act of sovereignty, carried out on good terms but with all the symbolic weight of raising the flag, marked the beginning of Argentine Ushuaia.
In the early 20th century the Argentine state decided to use Ushuaia's remoteness for what looked like its natural destiny: punishment. Following models such as France's Devil's Island or Australia, a prison for repeat offenders and dangerous convicts was built in Ushuaia, a jail intended for the country's most feared criminals and for political prisoners. The building, with radial wings converging on a central point, was finished around 1920 and became a byword for the 'jail at the end of the world'.
The grim genius of the place was that the geography itself acted as a wall: there was no need for very high walls, because escaping meant facing the forest, extreme cold and the immensity of the island, where a runaway died of cold or hunger. Through the cells passed famous prisoners, anarchists, notorious murderers and ordinary inmates who, through forced labor, built much of the Ushuaia of the day: buildings, streets and services.
The train came out of that labor. To supply firewood for the prison stoves and for the town, the prisoners built and operated a narrow-gauge railway that ran into the forest to fetch timber: the famous 'prisoners' train', which ran between 1902 and 1947. When the prison closed in 1947, by order of President Perón and on humanitarian grounds, the train fell out of use. In 1994 it was reborn for tourism as the End of the World Train, which today covers the last kilometers of that historic line. The old jail, for its part, became the Prison and Maritime Museum, one of the most visited sites in the city.
If Ushuaia's human history is intense, its nature is no less so. West of the city, on the Chilean border, stretches a mosaic of lenga and ñire forest, peat bogs, lakes, rivers and sea coast that was protected in 1960 with the creation of Tierra del Fuego National Park, the southernmost in Argentina and the only one that combines mountains, sub-Antarctic forest and sea.
The park was created by law no. 15,554, passed on 30 September 1960. Today it protects tens of thousands of hectares reaching the shore of the Beagle Channel and the southern end of Lake Fagnano. National Route 3 also ends there, at Bahía Lapataia, marked by the famous sign recalling that you are 3,063 km from Buenos Aires and at the 'end' of the road: one of the most sought-after photos in the country.
Its landscapes include Lake Acigami (formerly called Roca), Bahía Ensenada with views of the Chilean islands, coastal and mountain trails, and wildlife such as foxes, upland geese and birds. One curious and troubling note: beavers, introduced from Canada in 1946 for their pelts, bred out of control and are now an invasive species that alters the Fuegian forest, with their dams visible in many corners of the park. The National Park is, along with the Beagle, the great natural setting that defines the experience of visiting Ushuaia.
Contemporary Ushuaia is a thriving, cosmopolitan city with little in common with the remote penal settlement of the early 20th century. The industrial incentive scheme passed in 1972 drew in factories and people, and the city grew strongly; in 1991 Tierra del Fuego stopped being a National Territory and became the province of Tierra del Fuego, Antártida e Islas del Atlántico Sur, with Ushuaia as its capital. But the great engine of its present identity is tourism.
Today Ushuaia lives off its status as the 'end of the world'. Travellers arrive from all over the planet to sail the Beagle, see penguins, tour the National Park, ride the End of the World Train, ski at Cerro Castor and learn the harsh history of the prison. The 'end of the world' brand is everywhere, from the souvenirs to the passport stamp, and has become a powerful draw in itself.
But perhaps its most singular role is another one: Ushuaia is the main gateway to Antarctica. Every southern summer season, expedition cruises leave its port to cross the Drake Passage towards the Antarctic Peninsula, which makes the city a key logistics base for polar science and tourism. So the old Yámana bay 'that runs deep towards the west', the Anglican mission, the jail at the end of the world and the prisoners' train now sit alongside ships bound for the white continent: layers of a history that still looks, as it always has, towards the southern tip of the planet.