48 Fun Facts About Patagonia

Sailing west through the Strait of Magellan at Patagonia's tip brings a ship into which ocean?

Pacific means peaceful: Magellan named the ocean in 1520 because its water seemed so calm after the rough seas he had fought through to reach it.

Magellan's chronicler Pigafetta described the people his fleet met in Patagonia in 1520 as what?

Giants was Pigafetta's word: he wrote that the tallest sailor came up only to one man's waist. The locals were in truth just taller than Europeans of the day.

Which weapon of weighted cords did Patagonia's Tehuelche hunters throw to entangle their prey's legs?

Bolas are stone balls on cords, whirled overhead and thrown to wrap a running animal's legs; Argentina's gauchos later took them up to catch cattle.

Which French author's novel Night Flight drew on his years running an airmail service over Patagonia?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ran the mail airline Aeroposta Argentina from 1929 and flew its first service down the Patagonian coast himself; The Little Prince followed more than a decade later.

Local legend says anyone who eats which Patagonian berry is sure to return to the region?

Calafate is a thorny bush whose dark berries go into jam, and the tourist town beside the glaciers, El Calafate, takes its name from it.

Why is the eastern Patagonian steppe so dry compared with the Chilean side?

The Andes create a rain shadow: wet winds from the west drop their rain and snow climbing the Chilean side, then reach the eastern plains with almost nothing left.

Which predator deliberately beaches itself at Península Valdés to snatch sea lions from the shore?

Orca take a real risk each time: beaching usually kills whales, and one that misjudges its lunge can be left stranded on the shore.

Which wild camelid is the signature grazing animal of the Patagonian steppe?

Guanaco herds are the wild stock from which the llama was bred; they range from sea level to the snow line, while their wild cousin the vicuña keeps to higher ground.

Which scavenger, the world's heaviest soaring bird, rides the winds over Patagonia for hours without flapping?

Andean condor wings stay still for 99% of a flight: one bird tagged in Patagonia soared for five hours and more than 160 km on rising air without a single flap.

Which seabirds return each September to the same burrows at Punta Tombo on Argentina's Patagonian coast?

Penguins of the Magellanic species usually keep one mate for years: the male arrives first to reclaim last season's burrow, and the female joins him a few days later.

The sheltered gulfs of the Valdés Peninsula are a major breeding ground for which marine mammal?

Southern right whale mothers come to calve in the calm, sheltered gulfs, where kelp gulls have taken to pecking skin and blubber from the living whales.

A cave in Argentina's Santa Cruz province is famous for hundreds of prehistoric stencils of what?

Human hands, nearly all left ones, which suggests the painters held a bone spray pipe in the right; the site is Cueva de las Manos, the Cave of the Hands.

Magellan was sailing through the strait now named for him on 1 November 1520, so he named it after which feast day?

All Saints was Magellan's choice, Estrecho de Todos los Santos, but it did not last: Charles V of Spain, who had sponsored the voyage, renamed the strait after its discoverer.

Tierra del Fuego is said to be named for what sight that Magellan's crew saw from their ships in 1520?

Native campfires lined the coast because the islanders kept fires burning against the cold, reportedly even in their canoes, so the name means Land of Fire.

Which Argentine city on the Beagle Channel promotes itself as the 'End of the World'?

Ushuaia's claim to be the world's southernmost city has a rival: Chile's Puerto Williams lies farther south across the channel, though it has fewer than 3,000 residents.

Chile founded Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan in 1848 as what kind of settlement?

A penal colony was Chile's way of asserting its claim to the strait; in 1851 mutineers led by Lieutenant Cambiaso shot the governor and left the young town in ruins.

Cape Horn takes its name, by most accounts, from a port town in which European country?

Netherlands: the town of Hoorn backed Willem Schouten's 1616 voyage, which went looking for a new route to the Far East because the Dutch East India Company held a monopoly on the known ones.

Which naturalist rode with gauchos across Patagonia in the 1830s while his survey ship charted its coast?

Charles Darwin had been hunting for a rare small rhea when he realised his shipmates had just cooked and eaten one; he rescued the head, legs and feathers to send home.

Settlers who landed in Patagonia from the ship Mimosa in 1865 came to build a haven for which language?

Welsh needed a refuge from English, the settlers believed, so 153 of them sailed for a remote valley; in 2022 up to 5,000 Argentines were estimated to speak it.

The stormy sea passage between Cape Horn and Antarctica is named after which English sea captain?

Francis Drake never sailed through it: he took the Strait of Magellan in 1578, and a storm then drove his ship far enough south to show that open sea lay beyond.

Robert FitzRoy, who captained the Beagle on its Patagonian surveys, later pioneered which daily public service?

Weather forecasts were FitzRoy's answer to the 1859 wreck of the Royal Charter: he set up storm warnings for ships in 1861 and published the first public forecasts months later.

What name was given to Argentina's campaign of the 1870s and 1880s to seize Patagonia from its indigenous peoples?

Conquest of the Desert targeted land that was far from empty: the army drove out the Mapuche and other peoples, and its commander, Julio Roca, became president in 1880.

Which discovery in Tierra del Fuego let the Romanian adventurer Julius Popper mint his own coins in the 1880s?

Gold made Popper his own authority on the island: besides the coins, he issued a postage stamp priced in gold by weight.

After ranching in Patagonia, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid reportedly died in a 1908 shootout in which country?

Bolivia was where the trail ended: the pair had spent about four years as ranchers near Cholila, then sold up in 1905 when they feared the law had found them.

Which ice mass, shared by Chile and Argentina, feeds the Perito Moreno Glacier?

The Southern Patagonian Ice Field pushes the glacier across an arm of Lake Argentino until it dams it; the trapped water rises by up to 30 m, then bursts through the ice.

The Perito Moreno Glacier is named after Francisco Moreno, who made his name in the 1870s as what?

An explorer of Patagonia in his twenties, Moreno later served as Argentina's perito, or expert, in its border dispute with Chile and donated land that became Nahuel Huapi National Park.

In 1916 a Chilean navy tug from Punta Arenas rescued whose men from Elephant Island, off Antarctica?

Ernest Shackleton had already failed three times with other ships when Chile lent him the little tug Yelcho, which reached every stranded man and carried them back to Punta Arenas.

South America's largest glacier, Pío XI in Chile, is named after a man who held which title?

Pope Pius XI had himself been a keen alpinist: before his election he climbed Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn.

In Torres del Paine, 'Paine' is usually traced to an indigenous word for which colour?

Blue is the usual translation, but the word's origin is disputed: most accounts call it Tehuelche, while others trace it to a Mapuche term for sky blue applied by a guide around 1870.

Monte Fitz Roy's indigenous name, Chaltén, is usually translated as what?

Smoking mountain is the usual reading, for the cloud that almost always clings to the summit; early travellers even took the peak for a volcano.

The Patagonian toothfish was renamed by a fish merchant in 1977 to sell on American menus as what?

Chilean sea bass was the invention of wholesaler Lee Lantz, who wanted a name American diners would order; the deep-water fish is not a bass at all.

Cesare Maestri's claim to have made the first ascent of which Patagonian spire in 1959 is widely doubted?

Cerro Torre kept its secret: Maestri's partner Toni Egger died on the descent along with the camera, and climbers who completed his line in 2005 found no trace of the pair's passage.

What crowns one of Patagonia's most feared granite spires, making its true summit so hard to reach?

A mushroom of rime ice is built up by the constant wind; when Cesare Maestri bolted his way up in 1970 he stopped just below it, insisting the ice was not part of the mountain.

The Argentine lake-district city of Bariloche is noted for what Alpine-style speciality?

Chocolate suits a city whose centre was rebuilt in the 1930s to look like an Alpine town, earning the nickname Little Switzerland; it holds a chocolate festival every Easter week.

Roughly how long is Argentina's Ruta 40, which follows the Andes from the far north to Patagonia's southern tip?

About 5,200 km, measured from the south: its kilometre zero once stood on a street corner in Mendoza, mid-route, until the markers were reset to start at Cabo Vírgenes on the Patagonian coast.

Chile's Carretera Austral through Aysén was begun in 1976 under which ruler?

Augusto Pinochet's army engineers used thousands of conscripts to build the road, because until then overland travel to Chile's far south meant crossing into Argentina.

Which giant titanosaur was dug up in Patagonia after a farm labourer found a femur in 2010?

Named in 2017, it was first estimated at 37 m and 69 tonnes; its bones are held at the Egidio Feruglio museum in Trelew.

Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia was inspired by a piece of what animal's skin in his grandmother's cabinet?

A giant ground sloth, or mylodon, left the hide in a Patagonian cave; Chatwin's family called it a piece of brontosaurus, and he framed his whole journey as a search for another.

The outdoor clothing company Patagonia was founded in 1973 by which climber?

Yvon Chouinard gave the company away in 2022: he moved its ownership to a trust and a non-profit so that profits not reinvested go to fighting climate change.

Which co-founder of The North Face bought vast tracts of Chilean Patagonia to turn them into nature reserves?

Douglas Tompkins died in a kayaking accident on a Patagonian lake in 2015; his foundation then gave the land to Chile, and the reserve he began became Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park.

Which livestock animal, introduced in the late 19th century, became the mainstay of Patagonia's vast ranches?

Sheep were first shipped over from the Falkland Islands to the shores of the Strait of Magellan, and the wool boom that followed drew thousands of immigrants south.

Patagonia's oil boom began at Comodoro Rivadavia in 1907, when a crew struck petroleum while drilling for what?

Drinking water was so scarce in the young port that a well was sunk to find some; it hit oil instead, and the city is now known as Argentina's National Capital of Petroleum.

La Trochita, the steam train from Esquel, became known as the Old Patagonian Express thanks to which travel writer?

Paul Theroux set out on a subway train in Massachusetts and rode trains wherever he could down the Americas; La Trochita was the last of them.

The Upsala Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park is named after a university in which country?

Sweden's Uppsala University, then spelled with one p, sponsored the first glacier study in the region, and the glacier took its name.

Which Italian clothing magnate's group became the largest private landowner in Patagonia by taking over a British-founded ranching company?

Luciano Benetton's group holds roughly 900,000 hectares of ranchland, and Mapuche communities have gone to court claiming parts of it as their ancestral territory.

Despite looking like a long-legged hare, the Patagonian mara is a close relative of which household pet?

Guinea pig and mara both belong to the cavy family; the mara is one of its largest members, and pairs stay together for life, the male trailing his mate wherever she goes.

The sculpted caves and islets on General Carrera Lake in Chilean Patagonia are carved from which rock?

Marble here was hollowed out by the lake itself: its waters wore the shoreline cliffs into caverns and pillars that came to be called the Chapel and the Cathedral.

Which Chilean site in Llanquihue Province is generally dated to 14,500 years ago?

Monte Verde's bog preserved wood, rope and food scraps long dated at least 1,000 years before the Clovis hunters, though a 2026 study argues the site is far younger.