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History
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In 1869, Reverend Stirling became Tierra del Fuego's first white settler when he founded his
Anglican mission
amongst the YA?mana here; the city takes its name from the YA?mana tongue, and means "bay penetrating westwards". Stirling stayed for six months, before being recalled to the Falklands Islands to be appointed Anglican bishop for South America. Thomas Bridges, his assisant, returned to take over the mission in 1871, after which time Ushuaia began to figure on mariners' charts as a place of refuge in the event of shipwreck. A modest
monument
to the achievements of the early missionaries can be found where the first mission stood, on the south side of Ushuaia Bay, and is reached by the modern causeway, southwest of the town centre.
In 1884, Augusto Lasserre raised the Argentine flag over Ushuaia for the first time, formally incorporating this area into the Argentine Republic. From 1896, in order to consolidate its sovereignty and open up the region to wider colonization, the Argentinian State employed a popular nineteenth-century tactic and established a penal colony here. Forced convict labour was used for developing the diminutive town's infrastructure and for logging the local forests to build the town (by 1910, 25km of railway had been constructed for this purpose), but the prison had a reputation as the Siberia of Argentina and was eventually closed by PerA?n in 1947. Nowadays Ushuaia has a quite different reputation: the most populous and popular town in Tierra del Fuego, it depends largely on its thriving tourist industry, capitalizing on the beauty of its natural setting. You'll soon catch on that this is the world's most southerly resort and you can gather claims to fame galore - golf on the world's most southerly course, a ride on the world's most southerly train - but do your best to ignore this irritatingly ubiquitous epithet. Ushuaia has plenty of sites worthy of a visit on their own merits not just for their fortuitous geographical circumstance Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Argentina,
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