40 Fun Facts About Tierra Del Fuego

Which animal did Argentina bring to Tierra del Fuego from Canada in 1946, hoping to start a fur trade?

Beaver numbers exploded because Tierra del Fuego has few predators to hunt them, and the damage to its forests has been called the biggest since the last ice age.

Tierra del Fuego was named in 1520 after sailors on a Spanish expedition saw what along its coastline?

Native campfires lit the shore, and the expedition's leader feared the islanders were waiting in the forests to ambush his ships.

Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego grew up around which institution, closed by President Juan Perón in 1947?

A prison for repeat offenders was Argentina's way of planting settlers on the island, modelled on Britain's convict colony in Tasmania.

The Southern Fuegian Railway near Ushuaia, the southernmost working line on Earth, is marketed as the Train of what?

The End of the World is how Ushuaia sells nearly everything, and its little steam train runs into Tierra del Fuego National Park on track just 500 mm wide.

Cape Horn, the stormy southern tip of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, is named after a port in which country?

Merchants from the Netherlands port of Hoorn helped fund the 1616 voyage that first rounded the cape, and one of its two ships carried the town's name too.

The Pan-American Highway network ends near Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego; in which US state does it begin?

Alaska's Prudhoe Bay is the far end, about 30,000 km away, and the road finally runs out inside Tierra del Fuego National Park.

Which waterway between Tierra del Fuego and the South American mainland was first named after All Saints' Day?

The Strait of Magellan was entered by its European discoverer on 1 November 1520, All Saints' Day, and it narrows to just 2 km at one point.

Which famously rough stretch of ocean lies between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica?

The Drake Passage is the shortest crossing from Antarctica to any other land, about 800 km, and Spanish maps call it the Sea of Hoces after a navigator thought to have been blown there in 1525.

Tierra del Fuego's highest mountain range is named after which naturalist, who explored the islands in the 1830s?

Charles Darwin also has a peak in the range, named by his ship's captain as a present for the young naturalist's 25th birthday in 1834.

A Yaghan boy taken from Tierra del Fuego to England aboard HMS Beagle in 1830 was reputedly paid for with what?

A pearl button gave him his English name, Jemmy Button, and he became a celebrity in London before sailing home a year later.

In 2014, which motoring show's crew fled Argentine Tierra del Fuego after a mob objected to a car number plate?

Top Gear's crew had their cars stoned by protesters, because the plate was read as a jibe about the 1982 war.

Rounding Cape Horn stopped being essential for most cargo ships after which waterway opened in August 1914?

The Panama Canal cut the need to sail around South America, yet the cape is still on the fastest sailing route around the globe, so yacht racers keep coming.

By long tradition, a sailor who had rounded Cape Horn was entitled to wear which piece of jewellery?

An earring in the left ear was the mark, since that ear faced the cape on an eastbound voyage, and the wearer could also dine with one foot on the table.

Tourists take boats from Estancia Harberton in Tierra del Fuego to Isla Martillo to see rookeries of which animals?

Penguins breed there within reach of Estancia Harberton, the ranch a missionary founded in 1886 after resigning from the Anglican mission at Ushuaia.

What did an 1879 Chilean naval expedition report in Tierra del Fuego's river beds, setting off a rush of immigrants?

Gold in the streams drew miners from Chile, Argentina and Dalmatia, and the rush founded the archipelago's first towns before the deposits ran out.

Argentina's Tierra del Fuego Province claims which British-held archipelago, fought over in 1982, as its own?

The Falkland Islands are covered by the last words of the province's full name: Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and South Atlantic Islands.

The memorial sculpture near Cape Horn to sailors who died rounding it shows the silhouette of which seabird?

An albatross was the choice of Chilean sculptor José Balcells, and the memorial stands about a mile from the true cape, which is hard to reach by land or sea.

Which animal did Tierra del Fuego's Selk'nam hunt with bows and arrows, using its hide for shelters and clothing?

Guanaco supplied much of the hunters' meat as well, and the animals on the island were recorded as larger than those on the mainland.

Whose mediation in December 1978 stopped Argentina and Chile going to war over islands in the Beagle Channel?

Pope John Paul II sent a cardinal to shuttle between Buenos Aires and Santiago as Argentine forces prepared to invade, and a peace treaty followed in 1984.

Until 1960, most of which resource extracted in Chile came from the north of Tierra del Fuego?

Oil was struck there in 1945 by a state development agency, and Chile founded its national petroleum company five years later.

Which French novelist set a pirate adventure at a lighthouse on Isla de los Estados, east of Tierra del Fuego?

Jules Verne was inspired by a real lighthouse opened there in 1884, though tourists often mistake a red-and-white tower near Ushuaia for the one in his novel.

Which large crustacean, known locally as centolla, is fished in the cold waters around Tierra del Fuego?

King crab was so lucrative that in 1967 an Argentine schooner caught fishing off Gable Island had to be escorted out of Chilean waters by a patrol boat.

Trees around Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego are nicknamed flag-trees because what has made them grow in one direction?

Constant wind kills or deforms the branches on the exposed side, so the survivors all stream the same way like a banner.

'Mamihlapinatapai', from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, holds which title in the Guinness record book?

Most succinct word is the title, because the single term packs in a look shared by two people who each hope the other will make the first move.

Which Chilean naval town on Navarino Island, south of Ushuaia, also claims to be the world's southernmost city?

Puerto Williams began in 1953 as a navy base called Puerto Luisa, and Chile's statisticians officially classed it as a city in 2019.

Which captain of HMS Beagle, who later coined the term 'weather forecast', took four Fuegians to England in 1830?

Robert FitzRoy seized hostages after one of his whaleboats was stolen, then decided to have four young Fuegians educated in England.

Julius Popper, who issued his own coins and stamps in 1880s Tierra del Fuego, was an engineer born in which country?

Romania's capital, Bucharest, was his birthplace, and he ruled his mining camps with a private army until his sudden, unexplained death at 35.

Isla de los Estados, off Tierra del Fuego's eastern tip, shares its English name with a borough of which US city?

New York has the other Staten Island, and both take their name from the States General, the parliament of a 17th-century seafaring republic.

Which North Pole claimant borrowed missionary Thomas Bridges's Yaghan dictionary and never gave it back?

Frederick Cook took the manuscript away aboard the expedition ship Belgica and was later accused of trying to publish it under his own name.

Sailing alone past Tierra del Fuego in the 1890s, Joshua Slocum scattered what on deck to deter night-time boarders?

Tacks did the job after Slocum was warned of a night attack, and he sailed on to become the first person to circle the globe single-handed.

The Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego were hunted for bounties in the late 1800s to clear land for which industry?

Sheep farming companies paid for each death, proved with a pair of ears or hands, because the Selk'nam hunted the new flocks as game on their old lands.

Tierra del Fuego's Yaghan people wore almost no clothing in the cold; what did they smear on their bodies to trap heat?

Animal grease was only part of it: they also rested in a deep squat that cut heat loss, and slept in the open while visiting Europeans shivered under blankets.

The name Ushuaia comes from words in the Yaghan language describing which feature of the city's setting?

A deep bay is the usual translation, from ush and waia, and British missionaries were using the local name before Argentina founded its town there in 1884.

Trees from Tierra del Fuego have been planted on which naturally treeless North Atlantic archipelago to fight erosion?

The Faroe Islands took four Fuegian species, because trees from most other regions cannot cope with summers as cool as theirs.

Which unflattering name did a Royal Navy captain give a bay in Chilean Tierra del Fuego in 1827 for offering no shelter?

Useless Bay, Bahía Inútil in Spanish, gave ships neither anchorage nor shelter, yet a whole Chilean commune once carried its name.

Legend says anyone who eats which blue-black berry, picked in Tierra del Fuego, is certain to return to Patagonia?

Calafate berries go into jams and even beer, and the spiny evergreen bush that bears them is treated as a symbol of Patagonia.

Lenga, the deciduous tree that grows in the forests of Tierra del Fuego National Park, is a species of what?

Southern beech grows right down to Hornos Island, where one specimen is counted as the southernmost tree on the planet.

After Chile's 1973 coup, ministers of the ousted Allende government were held on which island off Tierra del Fuego?

Dawson had served a similar purpose decades earlier, when Chile interned displaced Selk'nam families there under Salesian missionaries.

Which lake, the largest in Tierra del Fuego, is also known as Cami and stretches almost 100 km from east to west?

Fagnano is named after a Salesian priest and fills a trench along the fault where the South American and Scotia plates slide past each other.

Which Wall Street bank gave the land for Karukinka Natural Park in Chilean Tierra del Fuego to a wildlife charity?

Goldman Sachs handed the forests to the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the park's name is what the Selk'nam called their homeland.