Punta Arenas

Date: November 26, 2022

We took a three hour bus ride to get from Puerto Natales to Punta Arenas, about 250 km further to the southeast.

On the northwest corner of Punta Arenas’s central plaza, Plaza Muñoz Gamero, stands Palacio Sara Braun, built between 1895 and 1905 by the French architect Numa Meyer for Sara Braun, the widow after José Nogueira, the most prominent businessman of Punta Arenas at the time.

The building still has most of its original features, including a beautiful winter garden:

Statue on Manuel Bulnes (1799–1866) who was the president of Chile between 1841 and 1851. From 1818 he served as a colonel during the Chilean War of Independence (1810-1826):

A nice green house in Punta Arenas:

The municipal cemetery in Punta Arenas is quite the tourist attraction. It is named after the Sara Braun who had the Palacio Sara Braun built and the cemetery covers four hectares. It has many very large and ornate mausoleums for prominent citizens of Punta Arenas:

For the more humble, several long, multiple-story tall walls with coffin sized niches are found at the ends of the cemetery:

Along the coast is a long promenade:

Several sculptures commemorating important events in Punta Arenas' and Patagonian/Antarctic history have been erected along the promenade. Here is one, inaugurated in 2021, in memory of the rescue of Ernest Shackleton's crew that had been marooned on Elephant Island in Antarctica during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917). More about the expedition and Shackleton will come in later posts. The memorial celebrates the Chilean sea captain Luis Pardo Villalón who with his ship, the Yelcho, came to the rescue of the 22 men from Shackleton's expedition:

An interesting graffiti we saw several places in Chile:

We could not find any information about it. Hopefully it doesn't mean anything very bad.