(Almost) at the end of the world

For many centuries Patagonia was the limit of the known world. A mythical land, distant and strange, inhabited by giant beings of unknown and unfamiliar customs and habits. The name Patagonia comes from the word meaning 'giant' that Magellan used on his 1520 voyage of exploration to describe the natives of this remote region of South America. Since ancient times, the few sailors who reached this land did so believing they had reached the gates of 'Terra Australis Incognita', - the legendary southernmost continent, hypothesised as far back as Aristotle and placed at the bottom of charts by European mapmakers from the fifteenth century onwards. Today, 600 years later, Patagonia remains, to a great extent, a wild, uncharted territory. This vast territory, shared by Argentina and Chile, is home to a great diversity of landscapes: mountains, fjords, lakes, islands, glaciers... and there are many reasons to think it still deserves the name of the edge of the world.

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