Visiting Ushuaia: Argentina's Gateway to Antarctica
Published: August 1, 2026.
More people leave for Antarctica from Ushuaia than from every other port on Earth combined. Somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of the roughly 100,000 people who visit the white continent each year pass through this one harbour on the Beagle Channel, boarding expedition ships bound for the Drake Passage and the Antarctic Peninsula, six hundred miles to the south. It is the least disputable thing about the city. Almost everything else Ushuaia is famous for turns out, on closer inspection, to be slightly more complicated than the postcards suggest.
Ushuaia calls itself the end of the world, and it says so constantly, on murals, mugs, boarding passes and the stamp visitors can get at the local post office. The claim is a founding myth in the truest sense: partly true, partly convenient, and repeated so often that the difference has stopped mattering to most people who hear it. What makes the city worth visiting is not just the glaciers and the channel views, though there is plenty of both, but the way its whole identity has been built, quite deliberately, out of a series of stories that are each a little more contested than they first appear.
A Prison Chosen for Its Isolation
Ushuaia’s official founding date is October 12, 1884, when an Argentine naval expedition under Commodore Augusto Lasserre raised the flag over a small sub-prefecture on the Beagle Channel, a year after Argentina and Chile had signed a boundary treaty over Tierra del Fuego. The flag-raising was less about the harbour itself than about who controlled the land behind it. Argentina wanted a permanent, visible claim on its southernmost territory, and the fastest way to put people somewhere this remote and this cold was to send people who had no choice in the matter.
In 1896, President Julio Argentino Roca signed the law that gave the plan its final shape: a prison for repeat offenders, to be built at the southern edge of the country specifically because the climate and distance made escape close to pointless. The first fourteen prisoners arrived by ship in January of that year. Construction of the permanent building began in 1902 and was not finished until 1920, five pavilions of single cells built, in large part, by the prisoners who would go on to occupy them. By 1911 the operation had absorbed the separate military prison on the island, and by the 1920s it held more than six hundred men in cells designed for fewer than four hundred, some ordinary criminals, some political prisoners caught up in the country’s upheavals.
The prison closed in 1947 on the order of President Juan Domingo Perón. What remains is now the Museo Marítimo y del Presidio, and it is the closest thing Ushuaia has to a single essential sight: five preserved pavilions of iron-doored cells, a maritime collection tracing the region’s shipwrecks and expeditions, and an exhibition devoted to the Antarctic explorers Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton, whose voyages passed through these same waters. One inmate’s line, painted onto a cell wall and quoted by later visitors, gives a better sense of the place than any summary could: working in the forest, he wrote, was the only way of defeating the prison.
The Railway That Punished, Then Entertained
The same men who built the prison also built a narrow-gauge railway to move timber and stone from the surrounding forest, first on wooden rails hauled by oxen and, from around 1909 and 1910, on metal Decauville track worked by two small steam locomotives. Prisoners rode out to Monte Susana each morning to cut lenga wood for heating and construction and rode back at night, sometimes pushing the wagons themselves when the animals or the engines failed. It was known, without much affection, as the Prisoners’ Train.
A 1949 earthquake wrecked the line and it sat abandoned for four decades. In 1994, a private tourism company revived it as the Tren del Fin del Mundo, the End of the World Train, running replica steam locomotives along the last eight kilometres of the old route into what is now Tierra del Fuego National Park. Passengers today sit in heated carriages with an audio guide describing the hardship of the men who once walked or were driven along the same track, then step off for coffee and a photograph at the forest’s edge. The reversal is almost too neat to invent: a line built by forced labour to punish men for their crimes has become, a century later, one of the most popular paid excursions in the city, sold specifically on the strength of that history rather than in spite of it.
The People Who Were There First
Long before any of this, the Beagle Channel belonged to the Yaghan, or Yámana, a canoe-based people who had lived along its shores and out toward Cape Horn for roughly eight thousand years, making them the southernmost Indigenous population on Earth. They travelled between islands in bark canoes, often near naked in a climate that regularly sits close to freezing, sustained by fires kept burning even inside the boats, which is very likely the origin of the name Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire, given by early European sailors who saw the smoke from a distance. The city’s own name comes from their language, usually translated as bay looking toward the west, or bay in the depths.
Contact with Europeans, when it came, was neither gentle nor accidental. In 1830, Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle, took four Yaghan people back to England, where they were dressed, educated and presented to society before being returned the following year in the hope of establishing friendlier relations. Charles Darwin, who sailed with FitzRoy on the ship’s second voyage in 1832 and 1833, wrote at length about the Yaghan in his journals, struck by what he saw as the vast distance between their way of life and his own, an observation that says at least as much about the era’s assumptions as it does about the people he was describing. Anglican missionaries followed from the 1850s onward, and with them came diseases against which the Yaghan had no defence. Their population, estimated at several thousand before contact, collapsed within a few generations.
For most of the twentieth century the Yaghan were treated, in effect, as a vanished people, a chapter closed. That framing held until 2022, when Cristina Calderón, widely described as the last fully Yaghan speaker of the language, died on Navarino Island across the channel in Chile at the age of ninety-three. Her death was reported around the world as the end of something. What received less attention is that it was also, among her own descendants and a small community of researchers, the beginning of a deliberate effort to recover what could still be recovered: archaeological work along the channel is now often carried out in partnership with Yaghan descendants rather than simply on their ancestral ground, and recordings of the language made in Calderón’s lifetime are being used to teach a new generation.
The Lighthouse That Isn't
Sailing out into the Beagle Channel on any of the boat tours that leave from Ushuaia’s waterfront, visitors are shown a squat red-and-white tower on a rocky islet, usually introduced as the Lighthouse at the End of the World, after the 1905 Jules Verne novel of the same name. It is a fitting story for the setting, and almost entirely wrong. The lighthouse Verne actually had in mind was San Juan de Salvamento, a remote and now-vanished light on Isla de los Estados, far to the east, which Verne never visited but researched from written accounts. The tower tourists actually see is Les Éclaireurs, built in 1920 to guide ships past the rocks at the mouth of Ushuaia Bay, an entirely functional piece of maritime infrastructure that happens to look exactly like what a novelist might imagine.
The confusion is old enough now that correcting it barely matters to the boat operators who point it out. Les Éclaireurs remains automated, uninhabited and off-limits to visitors, its solar-powered light still flashing every ten seconds for ships that no longer particularly need it, watched instead by cormorants, sea lions and the occasional camera lens. Its most dramatic moment came in 1930, when the liner Monte Cervantes struck the surrounding rocks; every passenger survived, though the ship’s captain did not. It is, in its own right, a genuine piece of the region’s maritime history. It is simply not the one everybody thinks they are looking at.
Who Actually Owns the End of the World
The largest crack in Ushuaia’s brand appeared in 2019, when Chile’s national statistics institute reclassified the small settlement of Puerto Williams, on the opposite shore of the Beagle Channel, from a town into a city. The change was administrative rather than physical, Puerto Williams had not grown overnight, but it meant that a place roughly ten kilometres further south than Ushuaia could now claim, by strict definition, to be the world’s southernmost city. Argentine newspapers covered the reclassification as something close to an affront; Chilean officials, according to their own mayor, were candid that the appeal of the title for tourism was part of the point.
Ushuaia’s answer to this has mostly been to keep doing what it was already doing, and with reason. Puerto Williams has around 3,000 residents, one bank, one petrol station that closes on Sundays and no cinema. Ushuaia has closer to 80,000 people, an international airport, a deep-water port and a name that has been marketed as a global travel destination for three decades. Whether the “southernmost city” title belongs to the larger, better-connected place or the smaller, more literally southern one depends entirely on which definition of city someone chooses to use, and neither Argentina nor Chile shows any sign of agreeing to one.
The One Claim Nobody Disputes
Set the geography argument aside, and the thing Ushuaia can actually claim without qualification is its role as the world’s dominant departure point for Antarctica. Argentina’s connection to the continent goes back to 1904, when it established a meteorological station on Laurie Island in the South Orkneys, one of the oldest continuously staffed research posts anywhere near the pole. Ushuaia’s deep-water port and proximity, roughly two days’ sailing across the Drake Passage, have made it the natural embarkation point ever since, and the numbers have grown sharply in the years since regular tourist voyages began: from around 35,000 passengers departing for Antarctica a decade ago to well over 100,000 in recent seasons, aboard everything from small expedition vessels to large cruise ships. In late December 2025, the port set a new record, nineteen ships over three days and more than 10,600 passengers passing through in a single weekend, the majority continuing south toward the Peninsula.
The growth has changed the city more visibly than any of its historical disputes. Hotel beds, short-term rentals and waterfront restaurants have expanded to match demand that runs hard from late October through March and falls away almost entirely for the rest of the year, and residents report rising rents and a housing squeeze that tracks closely with the tourism boom. Standing at the port on a summer afternoon, watching five or six ships load simultaneously for a continent most of their passengers will never set foot on again, it is difficult to argue with the idea that Ushuaia has found the one version of the end of the world that actually holds up to scrutiny: not the southernmost point on a map, but the last reliable place to buy a ticket south of it.
What There Is to Do Beyond the Port
Most visitors spend at least a night in Ushuaia before or after an Antarctic voyage, and the city rewards more than a passing glance. San Martín Avenue, the main commercial street a block up from the waterfront, runs the length of downtown past outdoor gear shops, chocolate makers and more than three hundred murals that have gone up on building walls over the past decade, a visible attempt by the city to give itself a personality beyond prison history and penguin tours. A chairlift a short drive from the centre climbs toward the Martial Glacier, giving a clear view back over the bay and the Beagle Channel on a good day, and continuing on foot brings walkers close to the ice itself.
Tierra del Fuego National Park, twelve kilometres west along Route 3, is the more substantial outing: Argentina’s only coastal national park, and the world’s southernmost, where trails run through southern beech forest to the shore of Lapataia Bay, the final stretch of the Pan-American Highway that begins, at its other end, in Alaska. Boat tours out onto the Beagle Channel pass sea lion colonies, cormorant rookeries and, weather depending, a decent chance of glimpsing the channel’s resident penguins, before circling back past Les Éclaireurs on the return leg. None of it requires believing every claim printed on a T-shirt in the airport gift shop. The place itself, glacier-backed and channel-bound at fifty-four degrees south, does not particularly need the exaggeration.
Tourist Information
Location: Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina, on the northern shore of the Beagle Channel.
Opening hours: The city itself has no opening hours. The Museo Marítimo y del Presidio is open daily, generally 10am to 8pm (hours shift seasonally), with last entry around 7:30pm. Tierra del Fuego National Park is typically open from around 8am to 8 or 9pm, with seasonal variation.
Typical visit duration: Most travellers spend two to four days in Ushuaia, combining the city with a day trip to the national park and, for many, an onward Antarctic voyage. Allow at least two hours for the Museo Marítimo y del Presidio.
How to get there: Ushuaia International Airport (USH) has regular flights from Buenos Aires and seasonal connections from other Argentine and international cities. The city can also be reached overland via Chile and the Argentine mainland, a long but scenic route through Patagonia.
Admission: The Museo Marítimo y del Presidio and Tierra del Fuego National Park both charge admission. Prices change with the exchange rate and season, so check the official museum website (museomaritimo.com) and the national parks administration site (parquesnacionales.gob.ar) for current rates before visiting.
Accessibility: Central Ushuaia is walkable but hilly, with steep streets running up from the waterfront. The Museo Marítimo has paved, mostly level access through its main halls. Tierra del Fuego National Park has some level, wheelchair-friendly paths near Lapataia Bay, though most trails involve uneven forest terrain unsuitable for limited mobility.
Facilities: The city centre has full tourist facilities, cafés, restaurants, pharmacies and outdoor gear shops along San Martín Avenue. The national park has toilets and a small visitor centre near the main entrance; a former campsite within the park is currently closed.
Best time to visit: The austral summer, November through March, offers the mildest weather, longest daylight and the only window for Antarctic departures, but also the highest prices and largest crowds. Late spring or early autumn (November or March) offers a reasonable balance of good conditions and fewer visitors.
Things to know before visiting Ushuaia:
- Weather changes quickly and without warning; layers and a windproof, waterproof outer layer are essential even in summer.
- The Tierra del Fuego National Park entrance fee must generally be paid in Argentine pesos cash at the gate; check current requirements before travelling.
- Shuttle buses to the national park leave regularly from the bus station near Avenida Maipú and Juana Fadul; a rental car offers more flexibility for reaching multiple trailheads.
- Mosquitoes can be a genuine nuisance in the national park during summer months; insect repellent is worth packing.
- The Antarctic cruise season runs roughly late October to March; outside these months the port and much of the tourist infrastructure quiets considerably.
Nearby places of interest:
- Martial Glacier, reached by chairlift and a short hike above the city.
- Les Éclaireurs Lighthouse, viewable from Beagle Channel boat tours.
- Lapataia Bay, the southern terminus of the Pan-American Highway, within Tierra del Fuego National Park.
- Estancia Harberton, a historic sheep ranch and penguin-viewing site east of the city.
- Puerto Williams, Chile, reachable by boat or ferry across the Beagle Channel.
Further Reading & Resources:
- Books: Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges, a firsthand account by the son of missionaries who grew up among the Yaghan and Selk’nam.
- Books: The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Jules Verne, the novel that inspired the region’s enduring (if misplaced) nickname.
- Documentaries: Presidio: Experimento Ushuaia, a four-part documentary series on the history of the Ushuaia prison, produced by Canal Encuentro.
- Museums: Museo Marítimo y del Presidio de Ushuaia (museomaritimo.com), the former prison and the city’s central historical site.
- Official websites: Administración de Parques Nacionales (parquesnacionales.gob.ar) for current Tierra del Fuego National Park information; Tren del Fin del Mundo (trendelfindelmundo.com.ar) for the heritage railway.
