About Tierra del Fuego . . .

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Strictly speaking, Tierra de Fuego refers to the archipelago on the tip of South America south of the Strait of Magellan. In recent times, however, more and more people have started using the name in a more inclusive fashion, referring to the southernmost tip of South America, but not necessarily starting on the south side of the famous Strait. Nobody knows why the name Tierra del Fuego has been creeping north, but some speculate that the name alone is intriguing, stimulating, making everyone in the general vicinity want to be a “Fuegino,” or “Fuegian.”

Ferdinand Magellan, who first discovered the Strait in 1520, referred to the land he could see from his ship as “the land of many fires,” or Tierra del Fuego. This was because of the bonfires he could see burning in the hills surrounding the waters he was navigating. At the time, there were natives in the area—the ones that kept those fires going—but as soon as sheep farming became profitable and gold was discovered, around the mid-nineteenth century, their days, similar to many peoples all over the Americas, were literally numbered. By the early twentieth century, there were hardly any natives left, and today, probably none.

The weather in western Tierra del Fuego, the Chilean portion, is predominantly cool and rainy, with some describing it as being miserable three hundred days of the year with the remaining sixty-five days being just plain evil. An average year on the western side means 180″ of rain, with the temperatures rising to cool in summertime, and dropping to extremely cold the rest of the time. Windswept is the best way to describe the land, and small shrubs and subarctic vegetation dominant. That’s not to say there aren’t any forests; there are, but the trees are small and take such a long time to grow, any medium to big scale lumber operation is simply not sustainable. These days, energy production from oil and gas, ecotourism, sheep farming, and commercial fishing in the surrounding ocean, as well as fly-fishing for sea-run brown trout, are the mainstay of the local economy. The truth is, there is nothing big in Tierra del Fuego, business wise, and to my way of thinking, the main asset here are the people: hardy, dedicated, tenacious, and with a love of the land equal to any I saw in my travels. My guess would be that most Fuegians love where they live and would not consider living anyplace else.

From In the Land of Fire.

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