Punta Arenas

Punta Arenas was founded in 1848 as a penal settlement and grew into the port of the Strait of Magellan - every ship between the Atlantic and the Pacific called here, and the sheep estancias of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego shipped their wool through it. The families who ran that trade, the Menendez and Braun houses among them, built the mansions on the Plaza de Armas and the enormous mausoleums in the cemetery. The Panama Canal opened in 1914 and the shipping stopped almost overnight. The wool boom also involved the systematic killing of the Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego.

History

The English name Sandy Point comes from John Narborough's voyage of 1669-1671, and Punta Arenas is the Spanish rendering of it. Spain had tried two settlements on the strait, Nombre de Jesús in 1584 and Ciudad del Rey don Felipe, later called Port Famine, and Thomas Cavendish took off the last survivor in 1587; in 1843 Chile sent the schooner Ancud under John Williams Wilson to found Fuerte Bulnes, and in 1848 the governor José de los Santos Mardones moved the settlement to its present site on the Las Minas river and named it Punta Arenas. Land grants from 1867 brought British settlers with sheep farming, Croatians outnumbered them from 1906, and the town's painted metal roofs earned it the name city of the red roofs (Wikipedia, Punta Arenas).

The main sights

• A port built on the Strait - every ship between two oceans called here.
• Wool merchants' mansions - on the Plaza de Armas and in the cemetery.
• Ruined by the Panama Canal - the traffic gone after 1914.
• The Selk'nam genocide - the killing of the Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego as sheep farming spread.

When to go

November to March; winter here is dark and severe. A full day.

Before you go

The wind is relentless and can be dangerous - ropes are strung on some streets to hold onto. Weather changes hourly. The city is spread out and grey in parts. Museums in the city cover the Selk'nam history to different degrees.

Nearby

Fuerte Bulnes is south; Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine are north.

Key facts