The Río Grande Mission

The big island of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago has only two significant cities, both on the Argentine side, and only one of them – Ushuaia – is a true destination for Patagonia-bound adventurers. Ushuaia has striking glaciated mountains and a scenic seaside setting, but Río Grande occupies a site on the wild-blown steppe of the island’s Atlantic seashore (though its rivers offer fine trout fishing).

Most of the year I live in California, where Franciscan fathers built a series of missions, at regular intervals, to catechize the area’s first peoples. Today those adobe missions are appealing attractions to visitors who follow the highway north from the Mexican border to Sonoma, about an hour north San Francisco. There aren’t a lot of comparisons between California and Tierra del Fuego (or the rest of Patagonia, for that matter), but the area had its own mission presence that should interest travelers who find themselves in the southern extremities of the Americas.

For backpackers and many others, an overland trip between Punta Arenas and Ushuaia is an intriguing option, but a long one on a roundabout route that includes either one short ferry trip or another longer but less frequent one. Either way, it’s a full-day itinerary on which Río Grande, a service center for the wool industry, also includes the historic Salesian mission (pictured above and below) – dating from 1893 - on its northern outskirts. Obviously, it’s far newer than the California missions, and its metal-clad buildings are very different from quake-prone adobes.

When I first visited the mission, in the early 1990s, the mission was weathered and dilapidated, with mundane and poorly organized museum collections. Recently, though, it’s undergone a renovation and reorganization, providing an exceptional introduction to the wildlife, native peoples (and the impact of sheep ranching on them), and the role that missionaries played in converting them to Roman Catholicism.

That was a mixed blessing to say the least, but the Salesian fathers managed to rescue many of them from the brutality of the ranches – in his memoir The Uttermost Part of the Earth, the Fuegian pioneer Lucas Bridges created a pseudonym to condemn the “unscrupulous” Scots-Canadian “Mr. McInch.” Alexander McLennan, the foreman employed by a large ranch, took pride in assassinating Selk’nam natives who had resorted to hunting sheep in lieu of their traditional food source, the guanaco, which had declined in numbers.

Recent Salesians have taken a strong interest in taxidermy, and the birds and other wildlife on display have undergone professional preparation (the present-day mission is also an agricultural school). In addition, there are exhibits on topics like the local radio station, which the friars pioneered at a time when communications were precarious. It’s also an open-air museum, with historic structures like the Capilla (chapel) and the Casa de las Hermanas, where the earliest nuns taught weaving and sewing to Selk’nam women. Right along the highway, with helpful and informative staff, it’s become an essential stop for overland travelers.

The Stars of Fireland

Recently, a young Chilean woman told me she moved to Tierra del Fuego because its clear nighttime skies offered spectacular views of the stars. It struck me, later, that there’s more than one way to interpret what she said.

Divided between Argentina and Chile, Tierra del Fuego is a large but thinly populated archipelago with an international reputation but only a handful of cities and towns. For most foreign visitors on a Patagonia vacation, the prime destination is Argentina’s Beagle Channel port of Ushuaia, the gateway to Antarctica, usually reached by air or cruise ship. For overland travelers, though, the tiny town of Tolhuin, where the land begins to rise midway between the industrial flatlands city of Río Grande and Ushuaia’s scenic sierras, the bakery known as Panadería La Unión has become an obligatory stopover.

In fact, all the buses that travel between Ushuaia and the Chilean city of Punta Arenas, on the South American mainland, stop here so that passengers can load up on medialunas (Argentina’s version of the French croissant) and other pastries, plus empanadas and chocolates for a 12-hour trip that involves a ferry crossing over the Strait of Magellan (there are no longer any flights between Ushuaia and Punta Arenas). So does almost every Argentine motorist en route to “the uttermost part of the earth” (to appropriate the title of pioneer Lucas Bridges’s memoir of his life on the island).

Many of them stop in hopes of glimpsing the Argentine and even foreign celebrities whose photographs cover the walls. Among them are the (now disgraced) President Carlos Menem (pictured above), the Dylanesque folk-rock singer León Greco (pictured below at left; his signature album “De Ushuaia a La Quiaca” spanned the length of the country) and even the US rock drummer Marky Ramone (pictured at bottom; the Ramones were enormously popular in Argentina). In a town that takes its name from an indigenous word meaning the “heart” of the island, there’s also a tribute to the late Buenos Aires surgeon René Favaloro, who pioneered coronary bypass surgery while working in the United States.

However quintessentially Argentine La Unión may be, it has one surprising shortcoming. In a country where almost every remote town offers fresh espresso on the spot, the “bakery to the stars” offers only a coin-operated vending machine to purchase coffee.