Tierra del Fuego was discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 when he sailed through the strait which was later named after him. In 1578 Sir Francis Drake sighted Cape Horn and in 1619 Garcia and Gonzalo de Nodal circumnavigated the archipelago. It was just over 200 years later in the 1820s when the archipelago was further explored by Robert Fitzroy and Philip Parker King who had voyaged there on the Beagle, also in the company of Charles Darwin.

The island was occupied by various indigenous peoples. The Onas lived in the north where they hunted the guanaco and other wild animals, while the Yaghans lived along the Beagle Channel to the south of the archipelago, hunting seals and otters and gathering shellfish. Other smaller tribal groups living on and around Tierra del Fuego were the Alacalufs and the Huash. The last of these indigenous peoples have all but died out, ravaged by disease.

The first white man to settle on the Tierra del Fuego was the Reverend Waite Stirling in 1869. He went on to found the Anglican mission among the native peoples. When Stirling was appointed Anglican Bishop for South America, his assistant Thomas Bridges succeeded him. In the 1880s a wave of European immigrants arrived from Croatia, Italy, Spain and Britain, not only to farm sheep, but in search of gold.

In 1884 the city of Ushuaia was declared part of Argentina. The Argentine government opened a penal colony in the 1890s, which had previously been located on Staten Island to the east of the Isla Grande, but it was subsequently closed by the then President Juan Peron in 1947. It now forms part of the Naval Base. Oil wasn’t discovered until the 1940s in Chilean Tierra del Fuego. In the 1970s another influx of immigrants arrived from Lithuania, Croatia and the Lebanon in search of new opportunities. Ushuaia is now the capital of Argentina’s most southerly province and continues to attract thousands of tourists every year.