Beagle Channel

The Beagle Channel is a natural strait roughly 240 kilometres long that slices through the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It was charted in 1831 by Captain Robert FitzRoy aboard HMS Beagle — and it was during the ship's second voyage that a young Charles Darwin made his passage here, observing indigenous Fuegian peoples and Patagonian wildlife that would later inform his theory of evolution. The channel is a glacially carved trough-fjord system flanked by Andean peaks plunging directly into cold, dark water. From Ushuaia, the world's southernmost city, daily boat excursions head out onto the channel: Magellanic penguins, sea lions and black-browed albatrosses colonise rocky islets, while the surrounding peaks and hanging glaciers make for a genuinely remote, end-of-the-earth atmosphere.