Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina can feel like the last outpost of civilization. It’s somewhere that’s always embraced that image: tourist slogans reading ‘fin del mundo’ are everywhere, alongside street art showing convicts in stripy prison uniforms, remembering when this part of Tierra del Fuego was somewhere you were once sent as a punishment. Even tourism has been outward looking, catering mainly to the thousands of travellers who pass through here using the port to sail south on an Antarctic expedition cruise.
But now the city authorities are starting to realise that maybe getting those tourists to stick around might be a good thing. Could a former penal colony at the end of the world become a top tourist destination? I recently spent two weeks in and around Ushuaia to find out.
Fly in, sail out?
My first impression of Ushuaia was one of complete surprise. It was my first time visiting, and flying in from Buenos Aires the view of the city and the surrounding area was amazing. Ushuaia occupies a thin strip of coastline along the wide and beautiful Beagle Channel, but the thing you couldn’t escape from the plane were the enormous mountains it was dwarfed by. Even in the middle of December – late summer in this part of the world – they still had plenty of snow, while their lower slopes were covered in a dark green carpet of forest.
The former trekking guide in me couldn’t help but get excited, like I had discovered a great secret before we even landed. These mountains looked made for hiking. Why had I never heard of them? Why had tourists always been so eager to rush through?
The short answer to that was apparent as soon as we started to descend. A handful of cruise ships were in port, either picking up or dropping off tourists eager to discover Antarctica. With the mountains rising up sharply behind Ushuaia, all roads in town seemed to lead to the port. A mural on the main street summed up the attitude: four penguins cheerily tripping their way past a road sign that led out of town and south towards the ice. In the previous tourist season, Ushuaia had seen 570 cruise ships and tens of thousands of tourists pass through its port. The challenge was to tempt some of them to see the city as a destination in its own right.
The Beagle Channel
My plan was to spend two weeks in and around Ushuaia, getting to know its moods. While the mountains called out to me the loudest, I wanted to start with the sea. As well as the polar cruise ships, the port was home to a variety of vessels for exploring the Beagle Channel. While plenty of local tourists seemed to be opting for large catamarans to take them on a shoreline cruise, I opted for a more intimate experience and took a small boat tour instead to feel better connected to the elements.
Dwarfed by the mountains Argentina on our left and the equally dramatic landscape of Chile’s Navarino island on our right, we bobbed along the waves to the Les Eclaireurs islands, where sealions were hauled up on the rocks around one of Ushuaia’s most famous landmarks: the bright red and white ‘Lighthouse at the End of the World’ that’s been guiding ships into harbour for over a century.
There was a chance to stretch our legs at a wilderness lookout, and on the way back to port we dropped anchor to be served with cheese and charcuterie boards: an unexpected nice touch. If Ushuaia was looking to show me that you didn’t need to take a boat and take a one way trip, it was a great start.
Into the mountains
Back on land, I was eager to dive into the mountains. As I was getting ready, it struck me that Ushuaia was like a larger version of another of Argentina’s gateway cities, El Calafate. People flock there to see Perito Moreno glacier, or to head out into Los Glaciares National Park. But unlike El Calafate, the high mountains were right here on the doorstep, and the trails promised to be almost completely empty.
With my guide and three other hikers, it took just 20 minutes to the trailhead from where we started walking to Turquesa Lagoon. The mountains opened up to give sweeping views, as we crossed into the snow line towards the alpine lake.
Home for the night was a simple but cosy cabin. After working for many years as a guide in Torres del Paine, where you can sometimes queue for a viewpoint on the W Trek in high season, it was exhilarating to have what felt like an entire mountain range to ourselves. Over the next few days, we crossed boulder-strewn moraine, hiked through valleys and up on to the back of the Vinciguerra Glacier. Every step felt like discovering a new country. In a way, that’s what we were doing: showing that there was a wild trek right on Ushuaia’s doorstep, completely hidden away and waiting to be revealed to the world.
Investing for the future
Over the next week, I watched the cruise passengers come and go in town. I stayed in one hotel where there were 70 guests at breakfast one morning, but when I came down the next day there were barely a handful of people waiting for coffee. On the surface it was easy to get the impression that things were barely changing.
Conversations with local guides convinced me otherwise. For years, Ushuaia had struggled to shed its image among Argentinians as the penal colony it was founded to be at the end of the 19th century. It was somewhere that people were eager to leave, or which could only attract incomers by offering them big tax breaks to settle here.
Now, people are starting to see Tierra del Fuego as Argentina’s next big thing. I went on an unlikely foodie experience at Alma Yagan along the Beagle Channel, run by a chef named Diana who had come here precisely because she saw that opportunity. The set up felt very Fuegan: it was so unassuming from the outside that you might have passed it by thinking it was an old fisherman’s cottage. But inside, fresh from the sea or harvested from the local forest was so delicious and beautifully presented that I could have been in one of Buenos Aires’s fanciest restaurants.
Other people – people with serious money – are starting to make the same bet. A week after I left Ushuaia the news broke that the Gran Meliá luxury hotel brand had signed a deal to spend US$50 million on a new 200 bed hotel in the city. With 200 new jobs expected to be created, with the knock-on effects for the tourism supply chain, it’s a confident bet that Ushuaia is about to become a bigger player on the national tourism scene, and one more confident in selling Tierra del Fuego as a destination in itself.
A diverse destination
During my time in Ushuaia, I got to explore the coastline by e-bike an, see its waterways by kayak and head deep into its forests by 4WD. And when I finally left, I made the trip down to the port to board a ship like the majority of other visitors to Ushuaia – but instead of sailing to Antarctica I took a four day cruise that explored Tierra del Fuego’s coast in more detail. We sailed to Cape Horn and explored hidden bays where enormous glaciers calved icebergs straight into the sea. This really did feel like the end of the world – a place where no roads had reached, or probably ever would.
From my time in Ushuaia, it was clear that it was home to the sort of attractions that any destination would die to have, but they were attractions that had been hidden away for too long, by people who could only see what was on the next horizon. As the city starts to look more confidently outward, it will be fascinating to see how tourism develops there.
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