This morning we pulled into Punta Arenas, the largest settlement in the south of Chile. I had been looking forward to our visit here because I had been able to book a trip to Magdalena Island, the famed penguin sanctuary in the middle of the Straights of Magellan. However, when I checked the reservation I had made some weeks ago on Viator, not being completely sure where I was supposed to meet the tour, I discovered that my reservation had been cancelled by the local operator. I sent a some emails and received an apology that that it had been overbooked and that my money had been refunded. The remaining tours offered by the ship did not seem all that interesting, but I picked the one that looked the most interesting and resolved to make the best of it.
John Byron, an eighteenth-century English explorer, observed a small piece of land on the west side of the Strait of Magellan, and he called it “Sandy Point” on his map. For some reason, the name stuck and the Spanish "Punta Arenas" is a translation of this earlier English name. A settlement here was established by the Chilean government in 1843 after the failure of the earlier settlement at Fort Bulnes — more on that later. The Chilean government understood how difficult it was to attract people to live in such a desolate region, so it was planned at first to be mostly a penal colony and a military outpost. But beginning with the Gold Rush, Punta Arenas also became an important place for ships to stop on their traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific, particularly for ships needing coal and water. Of course, the opening of the Panama Canal almost seriously reduced the need for ships to travel through the Straits. But by that time southern Patagonia had become one of the world’s most important sheep-raising areas, so Punta Arenas was not as hard hit as Valparaiso had been by the loss of ship traffic.
We did not have to take tender boats to the shore here, but the ship docked some kilometers north of town. The trip I had booked through the ship did not leave until just after noon, so we had the morning free. My plan was to spend the morning at Museo Nao Victoria, a local attraction featuring a full-scale replica of Magellan’s ship. Leaving the boat, I approached a couple taxis drivers on the pier and asked them how much they would charge for a trip to the Nao Victoria. Without the slightest trace of shame, they demanded 15 dollars for a trip that was barely over a kilometer. I refused to robbed like this, so John and I took the free shuttle to the center of town as he had a couple things he needed to buy anyhow.
The bus dropped us off at the Plaza de Armas, the square that forms the center of almost every Chilean town. This one is dominated by a monument to Magellan.
Both tourists and locals seem to like to rub the foot of the statue on one side of the monument. I think he is supposed to be a native person of the region, but I am not completely certain of this. At any rate, you can see how the patina is worn off the bronze here.
As always, the cathedral is located on the east side of the square. It is not an inspiring liturgical space.
Also on the square is the hotel where John and I stayed during our last visit here ten years ago.
It was not as grand on the inside as it looked outside, but the restaurant, located in the glassed-in solarium, was filled with plants in the best nineteenth century manner.
From the Plaza we caught an Uber to the Museo Nao Victoria. It is not a particularly grand location, and one reviewer on TripAdviser rather harshly said it was “just in somebody’s backyard.” That is not quite true, but coming down a small gravel road you see the ships behind cyclone fencing rather as if they were being imprisoned there indefinitely by the authorities. But once I passed through the gates, I focused on the ships and not the bleakness of the setting. The highlight, as the name suggests, is the reproduction of Magellan’s ship.
It really was a pretty tiny vessel to make such a long voyage. Inside, they had attempted to reproduce some furnishings such as that of Magellan’s cabin.
There we also a number of kitschy statues of Magellan
and his men.
There was not a great deal of signage, even in Spanish, so visitors were left to guess the functions of some parts of the ship.
The owners of the museum decided to reproduce a couple other historic ships. The most interesting of these to me was the HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his famous voyage to the Galapagos.
This ship is not completely finished yet, but it the original plans for the vessel are still extant, and the reproduction should be quite perfect when it is done. Just for my students I had to take this picture of the ship’s head.
There were two other vessels on the property. One, a very small boat indeed, was a reproduction of the James Caird, the lifeboat the Ernest Shakleton used when he and his crew had to abandon the Endurance.
The other was the Ancud, the ship that carried the first Chilean settlers to this region in the 1830s.
After a little over an hour, we were finished with the boats and it was time to go back to our own boat to catch our trip. We stopped in the small ticket office are to get a cup of coffee. They had some costume items there, and John could not resist putting them on.
But before I went, I had to have John taking a picture of me by the Strait of Magellan so that when my class reads By the Great Horn Spoon! I can prove that I had been there … and survived.
We went back inside the ship so John could get his heavy winter coat, the one he calls “Big Blue.” It was starting to rain when we met the bus on the pier. Our afternoon trip was to the Strait of Magellan National Park and Fort Bulnes, the first Chilean settlement on the Strait. Our guide on the bus was a young man with that lean, dark look of a Catholic seminarian or a Marxist revolutionary. He did speak excellent English. However, the sound system on the bus was almost worthless, and I could hear only about half of what he was saying.
Our first stop was in the city. We stopped at the Mirador Cerro de la Cruz, or Cross Hill Viewpoint. This was another place that John and I had been before, but it was interesting to come back to it again, despite the rain, to take some more pictures.
Maybe it was the rain, or maybe it was because I had been here before, but instead of trying to take panoramic shots of the city and the Strait, I concentrated on small details like windows
and roofs.
One things that definitely was not here ten years ago were the locks. Somehow sticking these on a bridge in Paris seems like a promise of eternal love. In Punta Arenas I wonder if isn’t a promise that someday in Springsteen’s words “we’ll get out while we’re young."
Getting back on the bus, they had done something to fix the audio system on the bus, and that helped a bit. But we had a long ride to the national park, and the guide finally stopped talking and most of us sort of napped until we got there.
It was still raining when we arrived at the national park. Our guide purchased admission for all of us, and we received a little brochure with a map of the area. We drove through some old wooden gates — apparently a favorite place for local families to take pictures — until we arrived at the interpretive center, a new modern building.
There was a lot of interesting stuff here, and our guide gave us a good tour. He told us some really fascinating things about the first people of Patagonia. I had seen some photographs of these people and knew that despite the cold weather, they seldom wore clothing but instead painted themselves in different colors and with geometric shapes. I did not know, however, that they were quite tall. Skeletal remains suggest that 2 meters, or about six feet, six inches, was a typical height. For most Spaniards, who were barely even five feet, the natives appeared to be giants. Magellan called them “Patagon” or “Big Feet” and the land where they lived became “Patagonia.”
John, who is six foot five and wears a size fourteen, immediately felt a kinship with these people. Sadly, not only did European diseases devastate this native population, but the Spanish settlers eliminated the remaining population by rounding them up and putting men and women in separate settlements.
From the interpretive center, we continued on to Fort Bulnes. This is a restoration of the first Chilean settlement on the Start of Magellan. It was not the first settlement in this area by Europeans. The Spanish had attempted to establish a couple settlement in the sixteenth century, and they had failed miserably. The second of them, the grandly name Cuidad del Rey don Felipe, became known to history as Port Famine. The few who did not starve to death in this unforgiving landscape begged passing English pirates to carry them away. The Chileans were determined to do better, and to make sure that their newly established country assert its control over the strategic Strait. The settlers came here from Chacabudo on the Ancud, the ship whose reproduction I had seen earlier. There were about thirty people on the tiny vessel including two women. The place they chose about 80 kilometers south of the present Punta Arenas, did have a commanding view of the Strait.
They built walls
and had some armaments.
While the canons look impressive, our guide explained, they really were not powerful enough to actual repel attackers. As a good deal of convict labor was also used to construct the fort, the first building built there was a prison! Only after that was the church
homes, and stables constructed.
I was surprised, given the amount of wood in the area, that they used a kind of adobe for the walls of the stables. I wondered how they ever got it to dry in this climate.
While the settlement was more successful than Port Famine, the settlement had problems not only with poor soil but with a steady water supply. Although rainy days are frequent in this area, not all that much rain actually falls because this part of Patagonia is in the rain shadow of the Andes. So the settlers requested the government to abandon Fort Bulnes and move their settlement north to the Las Minas river, the location of present-day Punta Arenas.
Before we left, I we took a walk down to the Strait so I could have my picture taken again here.
On our way home, the sun came out. I was surprised that while a few new expensive houses have been constructed along the shore, most of what you see there looks pretty miserably poor.
Coming back we also spotted some birds that initially looked like penguins. But our guide told us that they were a local species of cormorant.
In the evening, after dinner, we discovered Dale’s latest creation ready to greet us.
¡Adios, Chile! Tomorrow we will be in Argentina. But I will be back. There is much more to see in this fascinating country.
