USHUAIA, ARGENTINA | "El Fin del Mundo — The End of the World"
Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world — a former penal colony and naval base founded in 1884 at the very end of the Fuegian Andes, on the shores of the Beagle Channel where the mountains descend directly into the sub-Antarctic waters that separate Tierra del Fuego from Cape Horn and Antarctica. The city sits between the Martial Mountains above and the Beagle Channel below, and the combination of the dramatic topography, the extreme southern latitude, and the light of the extended summer days — when the sun barely sets between November and February — produces a quality of illumination that is unlike anything available in the Northern Hemisphere.
The colors are the specific palette of the sub-Antarctic: the deep green of the lenga beech forest in summer turning to brilliant orange and red in autumn, the grey-blue of the Beagle Channel, the white of the snow on the Martial range, and the extraordinary violet light of the Fuegian dusk that extends for hours at the end of the world's longest summer days.