History Day

27 February 2014

During the planning stage of our trip we were poring over a map, considering what to do with our visit to Patagonia, and I read the label on the body of water just south of the continent. My first thought was, "Oh! The Strait of Magellan. That's an important...history...thing." Obviously, I have retained very few meaningful details from my high school Euro Civ class, but I knew enough to look into it. Thus our second full day in Punta Arenas was dubbed "History Day." We did not create a poster board, but we did visit cool history places.

First stop was Fuerte Bulnes, a fort built in 1843 to defend Chilean territory from other folks in boats who might want to control pan-oceanic travel. Getting there involved a van, a Spanish-only tour guide, and 20 km of mostly paved road. Mountains on one side, ocean and more mountains on the other, and flat, scrubby land in between. (Actually, the tour guide spoke a tiny bit of English; enough to suggest that the best way to learn Spanish is to find a Chilean boyfriend. But I digress.)

Storming the fort

To me it felt similar to an American frontier fort from around the same time. Which makes sense, since Bulnes was a frontier fort.

Nothing says "impregnable fortress" like sod

Kat was in-carcel-rated

It only lasted as a fort for about five years, at which point they realized that the sandy point ("la punta arenas") further up the passage was much less determined to kill them or break their spirits than this particular piece of real estate was. The current buildings were reconstructed around 1942 as an historical landmark. Why the government felt such a wellspring of desire for authentic sod reproductions right in the middle of World War II, I don't know. One of these days I will actually read up on my Chilean history and find out.

This tree looked like it might be soft. It wasn't.

Fish-eyed panoramic. Pretty sure that fence was straight...

Gallows and church: very convenient for Last Rites

Church bell in the doorway, overlooking the End of the World

Protecting Chile from marauding penguins

There was a group of people in period costumes milling around the center of the site, but they didn't seem inclined to interact with us in an edu-taining way, like at Fort Snelling. It turns out they were actors filming something or other. I don't know if it was an actual movie or an informational thing, but if you come across a 2014 video set in the 1840's on the Strait of Magellan, I was totally there that day.

The site is actually privately owned, or at least privately administered. The re-creations and staging seem more or less historically accurate, but management has no qualms about breaking the fourth wall; we saw several buildings open to the public that were filled with sound equipment and/or random junk.

Conquistador helmet and roadie box storage room

This must be where the 19th c. soldiers kept their
mannequin torsos, headless skeletons, and Nalgene bottles.

A path past the fort itself led to a stunning view of the Strait, the final trailing bits of the Andes, and beyond that, Antartica.

Just beyond those hills is the edge of the American continent

Next stop on History Day was Puerto Hambre, which we mistook at first glance in the guidebook as Puerto Hombre, a.k.a. "Man Port." But no, it is the Port of Hunger, since in this first attempt at a Spanish settlement in 1584, everyone starved or froze to death in less than a year. Happy History Day, everyone!

Beautiful but apparently inhospitable

A piece of wall is all that remains of the church; archaeologists found
several bodies buried in the 1970's

Memorial to the doomed settlement, christened "Rey Don Felipe."
 Hopefully King Philip II agreed that there is no such thing as bad PR.

Also on hand was a tour bus full of yet more film crew folks, complete with craft services (a table with a coffee girl) and several suitcases full of swag jackets and shirts (not for us, sadly). The sight of a helicopter only a few hundred feet from the ill-fated ruins offered a jarring contrast. If the settlers had known about helicopters, I'm sure they would have prayed for this sight nightly.

To the rescue! Only 430 years late.

All in all, I'm happy to say that History Day turned out much better for us than for most of the peeps we learned about.