Ushuaia

For other uses, see Ushuaia (disambiguation). Ushuaia (pronounced ) is the capital of the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, and claims to be the world's southernmost city (see discussion below). It is located on the southern coast of the island of Tierra del Fuego in a wide bay, guarded on the north by the Martial mountain range and on the south by the Beagle Channel. Its population in 1999 was estimated at 57,300 The city was originally named by early British colonists after the name that the native Yámana people had for the area. Much of the early history of the city and its hinterland is described in great detail in Lucas Bridges’s book Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948). For most of the first half of the 20th century, the city was centered around a prison for serious criminals. The Argentine government set up this prison following the example of the British with Australia: being a remote island, escape from a prison on Tierra del Fuego would have been impossible. The prisoners thus became forced colonists and spent much of their time cutting wood in the lands around the prison and building the town. They built a railway from the forests to the settlement, now used as a tourist train as the Tren del Fin del Mundo (End of the Earth Train), the southernmost railway in the world. Ushuaia is surrounded by Magellanic subpolar forests; on the hills around the town we can find endemic trees of the area: Drimys winteri (Winter's bark), Maytenus magellanica (hard log mayten) and several species of Nothofagus that give to the landscape a magnificient greenness.
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