Argentina: The Best Tours in Ushuaia
The best tours in Ushuaia that I did were in Tierra del Fuego National Park, Hammer Island aka La Pingüinera, the Beagle Channel and a helicopter tour with HeliUshuaia. At this end of this blog is a list of other adventure tours and activities you can do in Ushuaia.
Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego
Visiting Tierra del Fuego National Park is one of the best things to do in Ushuaia, Argentina. It has the perfect mix of coast, forest, rivers, lakes, and mountains. If you have a car, you can explore the park on your own.
My tour was a full day with Canal Fun, starting with a paddle raft from Lago Roca on flat water through a maze of islands out to Lapataia Bay on the Beagle Channel. That part of the tour was billed as “canoa” though we were not in canoes. (The word rafting in South America refers only to whitewater rafting). After our boating experience, we were served a fantastic lunch in some domes inside the park. Lunch was followed by a hike along the north shore of Lapataia Bay west to east, ending at a post office billed as the “Fin del Mundo,” meaning End of the World.
There are a lot of things named Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia and it is certainly the farthest south you can drive a car anywhere in the world, though there are islands accessible by boat and plane that are farther south.
The hike was lovely, going through a forest of native beech trees, where I saw lots of birds. The most exciting were adult and juvenile Southern Crested Caracara and a family of Magellanic woodpeckers. Both parent woodpeckers care for their young and I got to watch them teaching their chicks how to get grubs from under bark. We also saw kingfishers, flightless vapor ducks, chimangos (a kind of small caracara) and more.
My guide was named Sonia and she was fantastic. She knew all of the flora and fauna and has a great sense of humor.
Entrance tickets for the national park can be bought ahead of time online or at the entrance to the park. If you stop at the entrance, take a few minutes to check out the museum, which has bilingual Spanish/English explanations of the region’s glacial history as well as an exhibit of local flora and fauna. If you don’t have a guide, it’s well worth your time to check out the museum. If you’re on a guided tour, you’ll hear most of the same stuff during the tour.
National Park Tickets Online
If you buy your tickets to the national park before you arrive, you’ll save time waiting in line. However, even if you already have your tickets, not far past the entrance gate there is an interpretive center with bathrooms and a great little museum that’s worth checking out.
Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego
The park is beautiful any time of year, but it’s definitely one of the best things to do in Ushuaia in the summer. I’m partial to the long days of austral summer between November and March. Even during summer it’s entirely possible to get a day or two of snow – which happened to me in February!
La Pingüinera de Isla Martillo
Hammer Island is the best place near Ushuaia to see penguins. There are several tour agencies that take boats from Ushuaia to the island, which includes a tour through the Beagle Channel. I went with Piratour, which is the only agency that has permission to land on the island. If you want to walk among the penguins, you have to go with Piratour. You’ll be driven from Ushuaia to Estancia Harberton, near Puerto Almanza.
I was in a group of ten people and the guide was quite firm on how close we could get to the penguins and how to not scare them. It was similar to visiting Isla Magdalena with Solo Expediciones from Punta Arenas, except that we couldn’t help getting a lot closer to the penguins because they were often napping or nesting right in the trail. The guide, Fabricio, was great at taking care of us and of the penguins.
Hammer Island is the top Ushuaia attraction because it has hundreds of nesting pairs of Magellanic and Gentoo penguins. When I was there one pair of King penguins also had a nest, though the island doesn’t have a real colony of King penguins. The best place to see King penguins is on the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego.
The other thing that you get with Piratour, that most other tour agencies don’t do, is a visit to the Acatushun Museum of Marine Birds and Mammals. It’s a private museum with an astonishing number of whale skeletons, along with skeletons of every marine bird or mammal that has died and washed up on the shore in the area. They have their own “bone house” where they clean the bones of animals that died of natural causes. Thankfully, it’s a good distance from the museum, so you can’t smell it.
El Canal Beagle
The Beagle Channel was named after Charles Darwin’s famous ship, which came through the channel in the 1830s. It goes around the south side of the island of Tierra del Fuego and is the border between Chile on the south side of the channel and Argentina on the north. The tour is called “Navegación del Canal Beagle” in Spanish but in English they translated it to me as sailing, rather than just navigation. I was expecting a sailboat or catamaran and was a bit disappointed to find myself on a large motorboat with at least twenty other people.
Our guide was named Andrea and she did a great job of bouncing between the Spanish speaking half of the group and the English speaking half. She explained how the channel was formed by glaciation and taught us about the history of the Indigenous Yagán people, the European explorers and some of the modern history of the 1970s conflict between Argentina and Chile. When we got to the Éclaireurs Lighthouse she told us about the sea lions and cormorants that live on the lighthouse’s tiny island. We also got to land on another, much larger island, where she led us on a short hike and taught us about the plants that grow on the island.
HeliUshuaia
Last but certainly not least, is my helicopter tour with HeliUshuaia. I wish there was a word for very, very, very spectacular. It was truly amazing. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.
Other adventure activities in Ushuaia
Mountain biking (several companies)
Scuba diving (two companies)
Horseback riding
Sport fishing
Zip line at Martial Glacier (just one)
Skiing and dog sledding in winter April through October. (two ski resorts and two dog sled parks)
ATV (summer) and snowmobile (winter)
