Isla Magdalena

The boat from Punta Arenas crosses the Strait of Magellan in about two hours, and for most of that crossing you are aware primarily of the wind and the color of the water — both of them more dramatic than anything you’d experience in an ordinary sea. The strait is the color of hammered pewter in most weather, and the wind crosses it from the south with a persistence that suggests it has been doing this for longer than anyone has been alive to notice. Then the island appears: a low brown-red smear on the water that, as you get closer, resolves into slopes covered in reddish grass and small round shapes that turn out, closer still, to be penguins. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, nesting in burrows that pock the hillside as densely as cobblestones.

Isla Magdalena is home to one of the largest Magellanic penguin colonies in the world — roughly sixty thousand breeding pairs arrive here every year between October and April to nest, hatch, and raise their young before heading back to sea. The island is a protected natural monument; visitors are restricted to a single marked path that winds through the colony, and you walk it slowly and carefully because the penguins have no path of their own and will use yours without any sense of obligation to get out of your way. They are not afraid of humans. They are not particularly interested in humans. They are busy with their own affairs — incubating eggs, arguing with neighbors over burrow boundaries, standing in pairs with their faces very close together in what appears to be conversation — and you are simply a large awkward thing that has wandered into their schedule.

What I hadn’t anticipated was the noise. Sixty thousand pairs of animals in an area the size of a few city blocks produces a sound that is genuinely overwhelming: a constant layered braying and barking and chittering that fills every frequency and bounces off the ground and has no silence underneath it. The individual calls are comic — a wheeze-honk that sounds like a small dog trying to start an engine — but sixty thousand of them simultaneously have a physical presence, a weight in the air. You stop noticing it after about ten minutes, which is itself interesting; the brain simply reclassifies it as background, the way city dwellers stop hearing traffic.

The smell is less adaptable. Sixty thousand penguins eating fish and living in close proximity produce an olfactory environment that is — I’ll use the diplomatic formulation — robust. It’s not a smell you stop noticing. It’s a smell that follows you back to the boat and stays in your clothes for the rest of the day and reminds you, every time you catch it, that you were somewhere genuinely alive.

The island has a lighthouse that dates to 1902, which the penguins have colonized as thoroughly as everywhere else. There is a small museum inside it, run by a single Chilean park ranger who is stationed on the island for months at a time and knows every distinguishable family of penguins in the colony. I talked to him for twenty minutes and he was the most contented-seeming person I met in all of Patagonia.

When to go: October through April only — the colony arrives in October and leaves in April. November and December are best for eggs and early chicks; January and February for fully grown juveniles learning to swim. Boats run from Punta Arenas; book ahead in the summer peak. The crossing is about two hours each way and can be rough — take medication if you’re susceptible to sea sickness.