When most people think of Patagonia, they picture sprawling glaciers and granite pinnacles—the postcard version. It is spectacular and it is real, but it’s only one version of the land. At the southern tip of South America, separated from the mainland by the Strait of Magellan, there is another Patagonia: Tierra del Fuego—the Land of Fire—is steppe, river, wind, and sky. Fewer people live here than almost anywhere else in Argentina. The landscape shifts from open grassland to lenga forest to snow-capped mountains. Local guide Marcos Villamil spends months on end here. Though he was born and raised in Buenos Aires, he feels most at home on his family’s farm three hours away. “I’ve always been with horses,” he says. When he was 19, Villamil completed his first 200-mile journey. He would eventually spend 15 months on horseback, crossing 6,000 miles and the full length of Argentina.
The continental stretch of Patagonia took him four months. The island of Tierra del Fuego took eight days. He saw the same range of landscape in both. “It’s like a compressed Patagonia,” he says. “In such a short distance, you see all the landscapes—the steppe, the open fields, the rivers, the yellow grass. Then…the forest starts, and then the mountains.” He has been returning ever since and is starting to settle there permanently. “It’s pretty much the end of the world,” he says.
The name dates to the 1500s. When Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan entered the strait at the island’s northern edge, he saw fire everywhere—in floating canoes belonging to Yagán fishermen, in massive pits built along the shores by the Selk’nam tribe—all of it reflecting off the sea. He called it Tierra del Fuego, and the name stuck. So did the island’s isolation. For centuries, the communities here were slow to give up old ways, largely because there was no pressure to. After colonization, sheep farming became the dominant trade, with estancias running tens of thousands of animals across vast tracts of land.
