Ushuaia → Ushuaia (2)

Ushuaia → Ushuaia (2)

Date: Sunday, March 21, 2027 · Distance: ~34 mi · Driving time: ~1h 45m (excluding stops) · Open in Google Maps

Road surfaces
Unpaved · 14 mi · 41%
Hiking · 7 mi · 22%
Compacted gravel · 6 mi · 19%
Asphalt · 3 mi · 9%
Paved · 2 mi · 6%
Unknown · 1 mi · 3%

The park begins less than ten kilometres west of Ushuaia, but the distance between the city and the wilderness it borders is better measured in other terms. Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego was established in 1960 as Argentina's first coastal national park — 630 square kilometres of sub-Antarctic forest, peat bog, glacial lake, and coastline. Much of it remains off-limits to visitors, a circumstance that concentrates the experience into a sequence of trails strung along Ruta Nacional 3 as it makes its celebrated descent to the road's end at Bahía Lapataia. It is a day best taken slowly, with no particular agenda beyond the one the landscape sets.

Into the Park

The drive out of Ushuaia follows Ruta 3 westward, clearing the last suburban fringe and entering the park proper within ten kilometres. The fires that European navigators saw burning along this shore at night gave the archipelago its name: Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire. Those fires belonged to the Yaghan, or Yámana, people — canoe-travelling, seafaring, and extraordinarily adapted to subpolar conditions, going largely unclothed in temperatures that would kill an unprotected European within hours, their bodies insulated by elevated metabolism and a layer of animal fat. They had lived here for at least eight thousand years. By 1908, fewer than two hundred survived. The last fully fluent native speaker of the Yaghan language, Cristina Calderón, died in 2022.

Bahía Ensenada Zaratiegui

The first stop inside the park is Bahía Ensenada Zaratiegui, a sheltered inlet where a rusted corrugated-iron building on a small dock marks the site of the Correo del Fin del Mundo — the End of the World Post Office, the southernmost postal unit on the planet. It has been closed for several years now, the dock sitting quietly over the water, but the bay itself is worth the pause: across the water, the Chilean islands of Redonda and Estorbo sit low on the horizon, and on clear days the peaks of Isla Navarino are visible beyond them.

From the parking area here, the Sendero Costero begins. The trail runs roughly eight kilometres one way — a 2.5 to 3 hour walk — tracking west along the coast toward the Centro de Visitantes Alakush on Ruta 3, threading between Cerro Bellavista and the shoreline through lenga beech forest. The path is waymarked with yellow stakes and gains and loses modest elevation as it crosses rocky headlands and drops to small pebble beaches — a few of them strewn with the purple-blue shells of cholga mussels, remnants of Yaghan middens not so different from the ones archaeologists continue to excavate up and down this coast. Views open intermittently across the water toward Isla Redonda and the Chilean shore.

Lago Acigami

Where the coastal trail rejoins Ruta 3, a short drive leads to the shore of Lago Acigami, formerly known as Lago Roca — a binational glacial lake shared with Chile, its western end crossing the international border. The lake sits in a wide mountain bowl between Cerro Cóndor and Cerro Guanaco, its water the pale blue-grey of glacial meltwater, and the surrounding lenga forest in summer runs from deep green to the early rust and amber of approaching autumn. There are benches along the shore well suited to a picnic lunch. The trailhead here splits: one path follows the lakeshore toward Hito XXIV, the boundary marker with Chile about 3.5 kilometres along the northwest shore; the steeper Sendero Cerro Guanaco climbs sharply into the hills above.

Bahía Lapataia

Ruta 3 ends here, at the terminus of one of the longest continuous road routes on Earth. The sign at the road's end reads: Fin de la Ruta Nac. No. 3 — Ushuaia 12 km — Alaska 17.848 km. The bay takes its name from the Yaghan word for "bay of the forest," and the name fits: the surrounding sub-Antarctic beech forest reaches almost to the water's edge, broken by boardwalks that thread through peat bog and beaver-flooded meadow. North American beavers were introduced to the island by the Argentine navy in 1946 — fifty pairs, intended to seed a fur trade that never materialised — and they have since transformed enormous stretches of the park's riparian habitat, felling lenga beech and creating flooded clearings that are still ecologically controversial. The evidence is everywhere near Lapataia: skeletal trunks standing in still water, wide dams of pale chewed timber, and the occasional beaver itself if you are patient and quiet near the Castorera trail.

From Bahía Lapataia, Puerto Arias is a short walk along the boardwalk, offering a broader vantage over the bay from a slightly elevated position on the eastern shore. The bay itself is sheltered from the prevailing westerlies, which is why the Yaghan used it as a recurring campsite — the same quality of shelter that makes it a pleasant place to sit for a while now.

Senda de la Baliza and the End of the Road

The last trail of the day begins just past the Ruta 3 terminus sign, bearing right from the main boardwalk and crossing a short wooden footbridge over Paso Arias. The Senda de la Baliza runs about 1.5 kilometres one way through coastal forest and peat bog to a small headland where a maritime beacon — a baliza — marks the eastern edge of the bay. The views from the point take in the full width of Bahía Lapataia and the Chilean coast receding into distance.

This headland, at roughly 54.86° south, is the southernmost point of the trip. The number is worth sitting with for a moment. In the Northern Hemisphere, the same latitude runs through Edinburgh, Copenhagen, and Edmonton — cities with airports, rush hours, and coffee shops. Here, it passes through almost nothing — ocean, wind, and a handful of remote outposts. The southern edges of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand all sit well to the north of this point. At this latitude in the Southern Hemisphere, the only comparable places are Isla Navarino directly across the water — home to Puerto Williams, a Chilean naval base and the southernmost town on Earth — and beyond it the uninhabited or barely inhabited subantarctic islands: South Georgia, the Kerguelen Islands, the Crozet Islands. The feeling of standing at the edge of the accessible world is not metaphorical — it is a matter of geography. Bahía Lapataia is the southern terminus of the Pan-American Highway, the farthest south you can drive in the Western Hemisphere, and the end of the southernmost paved public road on Earth.

The drive back to Ushuaia retraces Ruta 3 eastward, returning through the same lenga beech forest and arriving in the city in the early evening.