Punta Arenas Day Tour

Compared to Puerto Natales, there is distinct shortage of must dos here in Punta Arenas. When the number one rated activity on TripAdvisor is a visit to the cemetery, you know you’re in trouble. We are locked in for penguins tomorrow, and all the other days tours would just take us back to Torres del Paine, so that just leaves whatever sights we can find in and around the city. The people that own the apartment where we are staying have arranged a car and driver for the day. The driver speaks no English, and we speak very little Spanish, so it should be an adventure.

Our first destination is El Fuerte Bulnes, about a 40 minute drive south of town. This is the area where the Chileans built the first fort following their claim over the region in the mid 1800s. It is a desolate place with particularly nasty weather (when the trees around you are all growing sideways, you’ve picked a bad spot), and eventually the fort was abandoned and the settlement (which eventually became Punta Arenas) moved to a more desirable location.

This area also marks the spot that Chile claims as the mid-point of the country. We’re a long way south so I’m a bit surprised, but it seems that Chile claims territory all the way to the South Pole, so I guess if you start there and go all the way up to the border with Peru, this monument makes sense.

From here, we’re off to grab a nice lunch at a restaurant our driver recommends.

Fueled up once again, we head to our next stop, the Nao Victoria Museo. Here there are full-size replicas of the Nao Victoria (the ship Magellan sailed on when he passed through these straits on his trip around the globe), the HMS Beagle (made famous by Charles Darwin), the Ancud (the ship sent by the Chilean government to claim the region), and the James Caird (the lifeboat used by Ernest Shackleton to save the crew of the Endurance following his failed attempt to cross Antartica on foot). It is in an industrial area near the port, so an odd location for a museum, but interesting nevertheless. It’s the kind of place we know our boys would love, spending hours crawling through the different decks trying to figure out how all the rigging worked.

Finally, because it is the number one thing to do, we visit the cemetery. I have to admit, for a relatively small town (about 100,000 people now), it is quite impressive, reminding us both of the much better known Recoleta in Buenos Aires.

Here we part ways with our driver, as it is just a short walk back to our apartment where we kick off our shoes and call it a day.