Nearing the 'End of the World'

Ushuaia is a place where 'The End of the World' sells. The theme is celebrated on T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs and posters. You cannot get away from it.

"It's the magic of 'The End of the World'," says Mayor Jorge Garramuno. "As a brand, it is very powerful." He is talking geography, not Armageddon.

Ushuaia, situated along the picturesque Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, amid a backdrop of jagged, snow-capped mountains, proclaims itself the world's southernmost city.

Chilean officials like to make the same assertion about the town of Puerto Williams, a military settlement slightly to the south, but Ushuaia is, by comparison, a metropolis, home to more than 55,000. Hotels and travel agencies have multiplied in recent years like the region's abundant, albeit non-native, beavers.

Favoured spot

Foreign vacationers, mostly from the United States and Europe, can't seem to get enough of the tip of South America.

Non-stop flights from Buenos Aires touch down daily. Hundreds of cruise ships now anchor here during the relatively mild months between Christmas and Easter. The number of visitors to Ushuaia approached a quarter-million last year, double the total five years earlier.

"A lot of people are surprised when they arrive here because they think they are coming to a village where penguins are waddling on the streets and Indians are riding around in canoes," notes Garramuno, who arrived 27 years ago, when the city had less than one-fifth of today's population. "Instead they find a modern city."

Once marked on maps as Terra Incognita (unknown land), this is believed to be the last place on the globe that prehistoric humans reached by foot as the ice shelf retreated about 14,000 years ago.

Unknown land

Over the years, Ushuaia has served as an indigenous campsite, Anglican mission, prison colony and way station for corsairs, whalers, pirates and gold diggers, among others. The Indians, convicts and shipwreck survivors are all gone, only replaced by guidebook-toting, exotica-seeking sightseers in waterproof gear and hiking boots. Tourism pumps more than $120 million (Dh441 million) a year into the economy as the city milks the worldwide eco-awareness boom.

Ushuaia has gained global traction as a base to visit receding glaciers, observe penguin and sea lion colonies, follow the path of Charles Darwin and even trek beneath the ozone hole, which occasionally extends above the city, though it cannot be seen. Ushuaia is also the southern terminus of Patagonia, another tourist-brand-oozing cache.

The deep harbour is also a major gateway to Antarctica, an increasingly hip destination for the environmentally inclined.

The helicopter-and-submarine-equipped yacht Octopus came by in February, bringing Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, relatives and friends. Gates' associate Paul Allen, owner of the $250 million (Dh918 million) Octopus, also was on board.

But the onslaught of world-end chic has not shattered the allure — not yet, anyway. Although some unsightly development mars the town, nearby parks and waterways offer access to a largely unspoiled landscape of inlets and moorlands, forests and bays.

Fine balance

"There is something here that touches the imagination," says Gotz Bernau, violinist and concert-master of the Berlin Symphonic orchestra, seated at a picture window in a pricey hillside hotel as cottony snowflakes fell on the pines outside. "This could be Sweden or Switzerland. But you know it's the end of the world."

World's End festivals — arts, food, film, theatre — are metastasising as city promoters sell a terzo mondo alternative to Salzburg, Cannes and Sundance. "We have broken the artistic stranglehold of Europe and the USA!" declared Leonor Amarante, Brazilian curator of the recently ended 1st biennial of 'The End of the World', contemplated as a regular event. "The end of the world is the ideal place for artists to express concerns about the fate of humanity and our planet."

Exhibits included a stylised sunflower sculpture, dubbed a "sentinel" of climate change, and the Polar Project, a video installation featuring clips of humans standing on icebergs. There are in fact no icebergs in Ushuaia, still some 700 miles from Antarctica, but these extreme latitudes have long conveyed a sense of wildness and an untamed nature.

"The mountains ... rose in one unbroken sweep from the water's edge, and were covered to the height of fourteen or fifteen hundred feet by the dusky-coloured forest," Charles Darwin wrote almost two centuries ago in what is believed to be a description of Ushuaia.

Today, the busy main drag boasts an Irish pub, sundry boutiques, rough-weather outfitters and the inevitable proliferation of seafood eateries, cafes and the ubiquitous parrilla or barbecue restaurants.

A jumble of boxy buildings marches up from the water's edge while an industrial strip sits at the shore of the Beagle Channel, named after the brig sloop that carried Darwin here in the 1830s. In the harbour, factory fishing ships mingle with cruise liners, sailboats, tour vessels and the occasional research skiff.

"If people want to spend all that money to come here and see some penguins, that's fine by me," said Javier Adaro, who works as a deck hand on a catamaran that ferries visitors through Tierra del Fuego.

Tourist-fed

Residents, many of them migrants from other Argentine cities, seem mostly upbeat about the tourist influx. The city enjoys a high standard of living and low crime, though prices are high since many products must be brought in.

"This town runs on tourism now," says Gerardo Rouan, a sound engineer from Buenos Aires who drives a taxi here and enjoys the tranquillity.

Others worry that the tourism frenzy and unchecked building boom, now featuring multi-storey hotels, may obliterate Ushuaia's small-town essence and further degrade the environment — the very features that draw visitors.

"We welcome tourists," says Leonardo L. Lupiano, a writer who has lived here for nearly three decades and who bemoans how construction hammers now overwhelm the calls of seagulls. "But what we worry about is that Ushuaia will become like a little Las Vegas and lose its essential identity as the end of the world. That is a great risk."

Go there...Ushuaia


From the UAE
From Dubai: British Airways and Aerolineas Argentinas fly daily via London and Buenos Aires. Fare: Dh8,570
Air France and Aerolineas Argentinas fly four times a week via Buenos Aires. Fare: Dh8,330
Alitalia and Aerolines Argentina fly four times a week via Milan and Buenos Aires. Fare: Dh8,330

From Abu Dhabi: British Airways and Aerolines Argentina fly daily via London and Buenos Aires. Fare: Dh8,330
— Information courtesy: MMI Travel