Alberto de Agostini National Park

The park covers the western part of Tierra del Fuego and the islands around it - about fifteen thousand square kilometres of fjord, glacier and mountain with no roads, no towns and no land access of any kind. The Cordillera Darwin runs through it, carrying an ice field of about 2,600 square kilometres that a 2013 study in The Cryosphere ranks as the third largest temperate ice field in the Southern Hemisphere, and glaciers come off it directly into the sea in the fjords of the Beagle Channel's northern arm, the group known as Glacier Alley. It is named for Alberto Maria De Agostini, an Italian Salesian priest who explored, climbed, photographed and mapped this country from 1910 onwards, and whose photographs are the record of what the glaciers were.

History

The Yaghan settled along these channels about 10,000 years ago, and Charles Darwin met Fuegian people in the Murray Channel, an encounter that mattered to his later thinking on human evolution. The park was created on 22 January 1965 from the former Hollanda forest reserve and part of Hernando de Magallanes National Park, named after the Salesian missionary, explorer and photographer Alberto Maria De Agostini, whose maps and photographs recorded the region; some parts, such as the Agostini Fjord, were found only in the last century, and in 2005 UNESCO made it, with Cabo de Hornos National Park, the Cabo de Hornos Biosphere Reserve (Wikipedia, Alberto de Agostini National Park).

The landscape

• Fifteen thousand square kilometres of fjord - with no road access at all.
• The Cordillera Darwin ice field - the third largest temperate one in the Southern Hemisphere.
• Glaciers into the sea - the Beagle Channel's Glacier Alley.
• A priest's survey from 1910 - De Agostini's maps and photographs.

When to go

December to March. Several days on a vessel.

Before you go

There is no way in except by ship, and those voyages are expensive and often rough. Weather in this region is among the worst anywhere - rain, wind and cancelled landings are normal. There are no facilities of any kind ashore.

Nearby

Puerto Williams is east; the Beagle Channel runs through the park.

Key facts