TRAVEL AND TOURS

Tierra del Fuego, for those reading this name for the first time, it may evoke an image of an area full of volcanoes, with relaxing warm thermal waters. However, the fire lies only in the name of this remote and cold island, which belongs to Chile and Argentina and is surrounded by the Antarctic, the "White Continent".

The reason for the name has nothing to do with the weather or the smoking, active volcanoes, but rather with the bonfires which were used five centuries ago by the Ona and Yaghan tribes, owners and masters of the island. Due to its remote location in the south, it has up to 23 hours of sunlight every day in summer, but this does not warm it up much.
The gleaming bonfires were seen by the famous navigator Hernando de Magallanes (Magellan), who coined the name Tierra del Fuego without imagining that those red tongues of flame served to warm up the natives who, in spite of the cold climate, walked without any clothes.
"You come with nude faces - for us it is the same, our whole body is like our face", answered a native Ona to a curious European who asked him why they walked naked on the cold land. Later, evolutionists would explain that the island people had developed a higher body temperature than other men.
At present it would be good to be able to ask the natives many things. Unluckily, the history of this tribe is only found in books, because the thewy were mercilessly exterminated by the island settlers.
Today, Tierra del Fuego has no bonfires in. Only nature remains untouched, and sometimes uncontrolled, as when rough weather shipwrecked many ships trying to round Cape Horn, the ocean route mainly used before the Panama Canal was built. It is quietly inviting, tempting you to treck along trails abounding with exotic flora and fauna.
Whenever nature is at ease, the travellers can use their time challenging the slopes by walking or cycling, climbing up sharp stony cliffs on ancient ice, fishing, visiting the cowboys on their cattle ranches, or sailing through the Beagle Channel, while always imagining that he or she is at "the end of the world", as did Darwin, Cook or Magellan.