Ushuaia

Ushuaia sits at 54 degrees south on Tierra del Fuego's southern shore — beyond it the Beagle Channel, the Drake Passage, and then nothing human until Antarctica. The light behaves differently here: summer evenings stretch late and paint the Martial Range amber and rose, while winter strips the lenga beech to skeletal silhouettes against a pewter sky. This is the harbour Antarctic expeditions use as their final touch of the inhabited world.

Long promoted as the world's southernmost city — a title Chile's Puerto Williams now contests across the channel — Ushuaia grew around the penal colony Argentina planted at its far end from 1884; the old prison's cells still stand beside the maritime museum. The channel outside was named for HMS Beagle, which charted these waters in the 1830s on the voyage that carried Darwin. Tierra del Fuego National Park, reached by road from town, preserves subpolar forest of peat bog, beaver-dammed valleys and ancient lenga — country Darwin himself walked — and the Tren del Fin del Mundo enters the park on the prisoners' old narrow-gauge line. The channel is met by boat from the working harbour under wildlife rules, and in winter ski runs — the world's southernmost — open above the water.