The world's southernmost city — king crab feasts on the Strait of Magellan, guanaco plains, and the gateway to Chilean Patagonia and Antarctica
Punta Arenas is the capital of Chilean Patagonia and one of the southernmost cities of any size on earth — a windswept port city on the Strait of Magellan where the wind never really stops blowing and the centolla (king crab) is served in every restaurant between October and April. The city is the jumping-off point for Torres del Paine National Park (2 hours north), the Tierra del Fuego archipelago across the strait, and Antarctic expedition vessels that depart here for the Antarctic Peninsula. The Victorian-era Braun-Menéndez and Nogueira palaces in the central plaza reflect the extraordinar…
Punta Arenas was founded in 1848 as a Chilean penal colony to assert sovereignty over the Strait of Magellan — the same strait Ferdinand Magellan first transited in 1520 on the first circumnavigation of the globe. The city grew into a major international port when the Gold Rush ships of 1849 (and later general merchant traffic) were forced to use the Magellan strait rather than round Cape Horn. The completion of the Panama Canal in 1914 nearly destroyed the city overnight by eliminating the strategic value of the strait; Punta Arenas survived by pivoting to wool and mutton exports from the Pa…