Puerto Williams

Across the Beagle Channel from Ushuaia, close enough that you can see its lights on a clear night, Puerto Williams sits on the south shore of Navarino Island with about 2,500 residents and a strong opinion about its own geographic significance. Argentina claims Ushuaia as the world’s southernmost city; Chile counters that Puerto Williams qualifies under different municipal definitions and is anyway further south by a few kilometers. The dispute has been running for decades with the cheerful pointlessness of arguments between neighbors over a property line.

What matters is that Puerto Williams is genuinely extraordinary and almost no one goes there.

Getting Across the Channel

You reach Puerto Williams by small plane from Punta Arenas, or by a weekly ferry from Punta Arenas that takes about thirty hours and is famously rough in bad weather. The most interesting crossing is the daily catamaran from Ushuaia — a forty-minute trip that deposits you in a place that feels immediately different from its Argentine counterpart across the water. No cruise ships at anchor. No souvenir shops on the main street. A single grocery store. A museum in a converted cargo ship bow run by volunteers.

The Museo Martín Gusinde, named for the German missionary and ethnographer who documented the Yaghan people in the early twentieth century, is unexpectedly good — one of those small-town museums where the collection outstrips the facility. The photographs of the last Yaghan speakers, the accounts of their adaptation to cold that baffled European observers, the tools and canoes: all of it explained in careful bilingual plaques by someone who clearly cared about getting it right.

The Dientes Circuit

Above Puerto Williams, the Dientes de Navarino range forms a serrated skyline that makes the town look like something arranged by a production designer. The Dientes Circuit — a four to five day loop through those peaks — is considered the southernmost trekking route in the world. I walked the first day of it as a day hike, gaining enough altitude to look back down at the town and across the channel to the Argentine mountains behind Ushuaia.

The terrain above tree line is moorland and rock, the vegetation low and wind-sculpted, the bogs requiring either waterproof boots or philosophical acceptance of wet feet. I had the former. The views compensated for everything: south across Navarino toward the channels and islands that lead, eventually, to Cape Horn; north across the Beagle Channel to Argentina; east and west along a coast that in both directions eventually runs out of land.

The Yaghan Legacy

Cristina Calderón, born in 1931 and considered the last fully fluent native speaker of Yaghan, lived in Puerto Williams until her death in 2022. Her presence defined a particular quality in this town — the awareness that you were somewhere on the edge of something irreplaceable disappearing. There are efforts to document and revive the language. The museum takes them seriously. A small cultural center near the waterfront hosts occasional events.

I sat on the dock at dusk watching a Chilean naval patrol vessel move through the channel, thinking about the Yaghan who paddled these same waters in bark canoes for thousands of years before Europeans decided they needed converting and clothing. The cold that impressed Darwin — people naked in sleet — was simply adaptation to an environment that the Yaghan understood and Europeans did not.

When to go: November through March for trekking the Dientes Circuit and reasonable crossing conditions from Ushuaia. The ferry from Punta Arenas runs year-round but can be delayed weeks in winter. If you’re doing the full Dientes Circuit, January and February offer the longest days. The town itself receives visitors any month; winter is quieter and the bar at the yacht club, frequented by round-the-world sailors, is warmest in July.