54 images Created 14 Oct 2024
PATAGONIA, THE HARBOURS OF THE END OF THE WORLD
A “World’s End” of cliffs, sea channels, and silent fishermen, the Chilean Patagonia is a vertical landscape crushed between the waves of the Pacific and 18,000 square kilometers of glaciers. This narrow land begins south of Puerto Montt, where even the air smells of saltiness. “This is the real gateway to the World’s End.” says the locals in the dim light of a billiard room. At the harbor, the sailors stow a ferry with gigantic trucks under a deluge of rain; it is the umbilical cord connecting the Tierra del Fuego to other Chilean regions bypassing the Campo de Hielo Sur, a gigantic one-million-hectare glacier that breaks the country in two, from the Andes to the Pacific. Golfo de Penas (the Gulf of Distress), Pass of the Abyss, Bay of the Last Hope, Desolation Island, to understand the seas waiting for the ship, just read on a map the names that point to the naval route along the Patagonian channels. The ferry slips along Chiloè, an island sanctuary of Chilean identity full of houses covered with wooden chips that resemble fish scales. More than a hundred vaguely Scandinavian blue, yellow, and green churches are a UNESCO World Heritage Site built in the seventeenth century by Jesuits. A microscopic universe closed like an oyster where the indigenous Mapuches and the Spaniards contrived a distinctive soul, daughter of a precarious existence, that they brought in every corner of the Patagonias as seal hunters, whalers around Cape Horn, and gauchos. For them, Chiloè was the lost country filled with heartbreaking myths that the writer Francisco Coloane, the Melville of the Southern Hemisphere, son of a captain whaler, sailor, and whaler himself, revived for the outside world. From the roar of the waves against cliffs as high as mountains to the dull creak of glaciers that glide into the sea accompanied by the screeching of seabirds. Only the Chilotes know the secrets of glaciers and canals where the silence is broken only by the din-don of the sunken boats bells that rise from the sea in stormy days.
Puerto Williams, with less than two thousand inhabitants, is a small Austral Macondo, the most southerly inhabited place in the world, south of Ushuaia, which boasts the title of the southernmost city in the world. Further south, there is only Cape Horn, and the southernmost road of the Americas ends in front of the red roof of a small wooden house. The only ones to have roots in these icy canals were the Yaganes, Indigenous people whose history is a tragic tale of resilience and loss, killed by alcohol but also by the sailors of passing ships, even by the Christian charity of missionaries who don’t understand anything about their lives. The last of them are buried in a small cemetery in front of the sea, accompanied by the sound of a wind that never stops, on the border between the land of men and the frozen silence of Antarctica.
Puerto Williams, with less than two thousand inhabitants, is a small Austral Macondo, the most southerly inhabited place in the world, south of Ushuaia, which boasts the title of the southernmost city in the world. Further south, there is only Cape Horn, and the southernmost road of the Americas ends in front of the red roof of a small wooden house. The only ones to have roots in these icy canals were the Yaganes, Indigenous people whose history is a tragic tale of resilience and loss, killed by alcohol but also by the sailors of passing ships, even by the Christian charity of missionaries who don’t understand anything about their lives. The last of them are buried in a small cemetery in front of the sea, accompanied by the sound of a wind that never stops, on the border between the land of men and the frozen silence of Antarctica.
