The End of the World, Ushuaia, Argentina

publication date: Dec 1, 2007

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author/source: Polly Evans

‘Bienvenidos al fin del mundo,’ say the signposts in Ushuaia. Welcome to the end of the world.

Presumably the town’s first inhabitants thought the place apocalyptic enough, for it was founded as a penal colony. Following the apparent success of the English model in Australia and the French enclaves in New Caledonia and Algeria, the Argentine authorities decided to establish a convicts’ settlement in their own southern territories, and thereby to solve two pressing problems. First, the penitentiary in Buenos Aires was overcrowded, and the authorities wanted somewhere nasty to dispose of hardened re-offenders. Second, the Argentine government had in 1881 signed the Boundaries Treaty with Chile and it was keen to inhabit this barren outpost in order to protect Argentine sovereignty.

The first convict boat arrived in 1884. Its passengers had received their sentences with terror: Ushuaia lies on the icy southern coast of Argentine Tierra del Fuego – beyond, there’s just Antarctica – and for most of them the ticket was one-way.

Today, the prison – which was closed in 1947 – is open to the public as a museum. In the cells, former inmates pose in papier mâché form. Political activists rub striped shoulders with common criminals. One of the most intriguing is Cayetano Santos Godino, who was locked up in the Ushuaia jail after he was convicted of killing a series of small children. Interestingly, the doctors of the day deemed that the source of his evil lay in his outsized ears: they concluded that, if they hacked them back to a more conventional size, Santos Godino’s propensity for vile acts of murder would be diminished. And so, on 4 November 1927, they forced the prisoner to undergo a rather crude form of plastic surgery. Sadly, it didn’t work. Rumour has it that his ears grew back, and then, one day, he demonstrated that his murderous tendencies had grown back with them: he threw a cat in the fire. His fellow prisoners, determined no doubt to demonstrate their own benignity, beat him so severely that he died.

Further reading: Uttermost Part of the Earthby Lucas Bridges tells the story of the Bridges’ family’s arrival here, their interaction with the Yamana and Ona tribespeople, their missionary work and their eventual settlement at Harberton. It’s a must-read if you’re ever visiting this part of the world.