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.