The gateway to Antartica, where the oceans meet and the westerly wind is constant. The island offers a unique experience out of Ushuahia, the southernmost city of the world. The patagonian coasts have the greatest concentration of marine fauna on the planet. Meet albatrosses, waders, penguins, seals, elephant seals, orcas, whales. The Valdez Peninsula has one of the most important marine fauna reservations in the world.
Right whales come to bear their young and breed.
Sixty miles south of Trelew, a city founded by Welsh settlers in 1886, the Punta Tombo Reserve has the biggest continental colony of magellanic penguins as well as countless sea-birds which come to nest. Trelew has the famed Egidio Feruglio Paleontological museum, and ten miles west, at Gaiman, the Bryn Gwyn Park offers field paleontology where open beds of fossils, from ten to thirty eight million years old are exposed. Further south, near the town of Sarmiento, one hundred and thirty million year old petrified free Trunks one hundred feet long by eight feet diameter are to be seen at the Petrified Forest Geological Reserve. These are the remains of once lush forests wich grew in warmer, wetter climates before the rainshadow of the Andes changed it all. The typical scenery of northern Patagonia in Chile is native beech forests, cultivated fields, lakes, rivers and perfectly conical volcanoes.