THE SOUND NAMED FOR GIVING UP
In 1557 the governor of Chile sent the navigator Juan Ladrillero south with two ships and a brigantine to chart the coast from Valdivia down to the Strait of Magellan and take formal possession of it for Spain — a mission he eventually completed, becoming the first European to sail the strait from its Pacific entrance to its Atlantic one and back again. Along the way he worked his way into a long fjord branching off the main channel, hoping it would offer a shorter route through. It did not: the sound dead-ends against glacier-fed mountains with no passage out the far side. Ladrillero named it Última Esperanza, Last Hope, and sailed on to find his real route elsewhere. The name stuck to the water Puerto Natales was built on 350 years later, and a monument to Ladrillero now stands in the town that failure produced.
THE CANOE PEOPLE THE SOUND BELONGED TO FIRST
Long before any Spanish ship entered Última Esperanza, the Kawésqar — a nomadic seafaring people also known by the Yahgan-derived name Alacaluf, "mussel eater" — worked these channels in eight-to-nine-metre bark canoes built to carry a family and its dog, moving between islands to fish and gather shellfish in a climate few land-based cultures could have sustained. European contact and, later, Chilean settlement brought disease and displacement that collapsed their population within a few generations. The Kawésqar were never fully removed from the region, though: descendants still live today in Puerto Natales and Punta Arenas, and in the tiny village of Puerto Edén further up the coast, one of the last places their language is still spoken at all.
A TOWN BUILT TO FREEZE SHEEP
Puerto Natales exists because a British-Chilean company needed a cold-storage port. The Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, which by the early 1900s controlled roughly a million hectares of sheep-grazing land across the Magallanes region, founded the town in 1911 specifically to build a frigorífico — a meat-processing and freezing plant — at Puerto Bories on its shore, so that wool and mutton from those estancias could be shipped to Europe without spoiling. At its peak the plant processed on the order of a quarter-million sheep a year. Everything about the town's original layout, down to the worker housing that still stands at Puerto Bories, was built around that single industrial function; the settlement came second, an afterthought to the freezer. The plant itself stayed in commercial operation for the better part of a century before closing down through the 1990s.
A SLOTH'S SKIN THAT ENDED UP IN A BOOK
In 1895 the German explorer Hermann Eberhard was investigating a cave at the foot of Cerro Benítez, a short drive from where the town would later stand, when he found a large piece of skin that looked disturbingly fresh. It turned out to belong to Mylodon darwinii, a ground sloth extinct for roughly ten thousand years, preserved by the cave's cold, dry conditions. A piece of that skin eventually crossed the Atlantic as a gift from a Punta Arenas resident, Charles Amherst Milward, to his English cousin — whose grandson, the writer Bruce Chatwin, grew up being told it was a scrap of "brontosaurus" kept in his grandmother's curio cabinet. Chatwin's search for the truth behind that story, decades later, became the opening chapter of In Patagonia (1977), the book usually credited with reviving travel writing as a genre and with putting this entire region on the literary map. By the time Chatwin went looking, the actual skin fragment had already been thrown out; the cave that produced it is now a national monument on Day 1 of this guide.
FROM WOOL PORT TO TREKKING GATEWAY
The wool economy that built Puerto Natales went into decline through the mid-20th century as synthetic fibers undercut demand and the Sociedad Explotadora's land holdings were broken up; the Puerto Bories frigorífico itself wound down through the 1990s and today its restored halls form the shell of a luxury hotel rather than a working plant. What replaced the sheep economy was Torres del Paine National Park, created in 1959 and steadily built up as a hiking destination through the following decades until Puerto Natales — the nearest town with a real airport connection and a supply of hotel beds — became its default gateway. The taxi and tour-van fleet that now fills the town's streets every morning is, in a direct if unplanned way, the wool port's successor: the same geography that once made this the right place to freeze a sheep now makes it the right place to stage a hike.