Punta Arenas, Chile: Gateway to Patagonia and the Southern Seas

The Nao Victoria Museum at the waterfront is the most unusual maritime museum in the world: full-scale working replicas of Ferdinand Magellan's flagship Victoria, Charles Darwin's survey vessel Beagle, and Ernest Shackleton's lifeboat James Caird, all anchored in a park and boardable by visitors. The replicas were built by craftsmen using period techniques and have since sailed their original routes — the James Caird crossed the Drake Passage again in 2000. Seeing all three together in one place, at the actual latitude where their histories played out, is quietly extraordinary.

The Cementerio Municipal Sara Braun on Avenida Bulnes is one of the most affecting cemeteries in South America. The Braun and Menéndez families, who built wool and cattle fortunes on Patagonian estancias in the late nineteenth century, are buried beneath elaborate marble monuments in the central family pantheon. Beyond these, the graves of the Fuegian indigenous peoples, Croatian and Dalmatian immigrant workers, and Chilean naval officers fill the section that spreads beneath the cypresses and flowering trees. The bronze statue of a Kawésqar man near the entrance is worn shiny at the feet — tradition holds that touching them brings good luck.

Otway Sound, forty-five minutes north of the city, holds one of the southernmost Magellanic penguin colonies on the mainland. The colony is smaller than the famous one at Punta Tombo in northern Patagonia, but the setting — windswept tundra beside a brackish inlet under a wide Patagonian sky — is specific to this latitude in a way that more touristy colonies are not. Penguins are present from September through March; outside those months the colony is empty.

The Palacio Sara Braun on the central plaza, now a hotel and restaurant, was built in 1905 for the widow of one of the region's wealthiest landowners and remains the finest example of French neoclassical architecture in southern Chile. The public rooms on the ground floor are open to visitors; the interior woodwork, imported French furnishings, and ceramic fireplaces give a clear picture of what Patagonian money looked like at its height. The city's other great house, Palacio Mauricio Braun (now the Museo Regional de Magallanes), is across the plaza and has an excellent collection of period furniture and photographs of estancia life.

Lamb and centolla — southern king crab — dominate the menus here, as they do further south in Ushuaia. The cordero al palo (whole lamb roasted on a cross-spit over an open fire) takes four to five hours and is a set-piece at the estancias that now operate as restaurants outside the city; the centolla at the central market is typically sold fresh-cooked and eaten at picnic tables in the market hall itself, which is warmer and more practical than the restaurant version.