Cabo de Hornos National Park

Listen first to the wind. Here it rarely pauses. It comes off the open ocean with nothing to stop it, and it pushes against your jacket and fills your ears with a low, steady roar. Underfoot, the ground is soft and springy, a thick mat of moss, low shrubs and peat. The light changes every few minutes as clouds race overhead. Welcome to Cabo de Hornos National Park, near the very bottom of the inhabited world.

This park sits in Chile's far south, in the Antártica Chilena Province, among a scatter of rocky islands below Tierra del Fuego. It was created in 1945, which makes it one of the oldest protected areas in the region. It covers islands of the Wollaston and Hermite groups. The most famous of them all is Horn Island, and on its southern tip stands the headland the world knows as Cape Horn.

So where does that name come from? Many people assume it describes the shape of the rock, like a horn rising from the sea. It does not. In 1616, two Dutch navigators, Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire, sailed past this point on their search for a new route to the Pacific. They named it after Hoorn, a port town in the Netherlands that had helped fund their voyage. The English version, Cape Horn, simply followed the sound of the Dutch word.

To the south of the cape lies the Drake Passage, the stretch of water between South America and Antarctica. Here the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet. Winds circle the planet at these latitudes with almost no land to slow them. The sea floor also rises sharply near the cape, and this pushes the swell into steep, powerful waves. For centuries, this combination made the waters around Cape Horn some of the most feared on any sailing route.

Before the Panama Canal opened in the early twentieth century, many cargo ships had no choice. To travel between the Atlantic and Pacific, they had to come this way. Sailing ships carried grain, wool and nitrate around the cape, often in brutal conditions. Many vessels and many sailors never made it home. Sailor tradition holds that a man who rounded the Horn earned certain privileges, such as the right to wear a gold earring. These customs are part of maritime folklore rather than any written law.

Long before European ships arrived, people already lived in this maze of islands and channels. The Yaghan people, also called the Yámana, travelled these waters in bark canoes. They fished, gathered shellfish and hunted sea mammals. They often kept a small fire burning inside the canoe, carefully set on a bed of earth or clay. Their knowledge of these cold, windy channels was remarkable. Today, descendants of the Yaghan still live in the region, around the town of Puerto Williams to the north.

Now look around at the land itself. At first glance it may seem bare, just grass and rock and wind. But kneel down, and a different world appears. The ground is covered with mosses, lichens and liverworts in many shades of green, gold and rust. Scientists have studied this region as a centre of moss diversity. They sometimes describe these tiny plants as miniature forests, and they encourage visitors to look at them as closely as they would look at tall trees.

In more sheltered valleys of the park, real forests grow too. These are southern beech forests, made of trees from a family found across the southern lands of the world. Here the trees are often low and bent. The wind shapes them, so many lean in the same direction, like flags frozen in one position. This is part of what ecologists call the sub-Antarctic forest, among the southernmost forests on Earth.

The park also protects a wide area of sea, and this is where much of the life is found. Albatrosses glide over the waves on long, stiff wings, barely moving them at all. Giant petrels and other seabirds follow the wind currents. On some shores, Magellanic penguins nest in burrows dug into the soil. In the surrounding waters, you may also see sea lions or dolphins. The wider area was recognised by UNESCO in 2005 as part of the Cabo de Hornos Biosphere Reserve.

If you landed on Horn Island, you probably climbed a wooden staircase from the beach and walked along a boardwalk. The boardwalk protects the fragile ground, so please stay on it. At the top, there is a small station run by the Chilean Navy. A lighthouse keeper lives here, often with family, for a long posting at the end of the world. Beside the station stands a small wooden chapel, a simple shelter for quiet thought in a very wild place.

Further along the path, you reach the monument. Its tall steel panels form the outline of an albatross in flight, seen against the sky. It was created by the Chilean sculptor José Balcells and unveiled in the early 1990s. It honours the sailors who died trying to round Cape Horn. Nearby, a plaque carries a poem by Sara Vial. In it, the albatross speaks as the soul of a lost sailor, still flying over the southern seas.

Here is something many visitors do not realise. Reaching this spot is never guaranteed, even after a long journey. Captains and park staff decide each day whether a landing is safe. Wind, swell and sudden storms can close the beach in minutes. Some travellers try more than once and never set foot on the island. If you are standing here now, you are one of the lucky ones, and the sea let you in today.

The park is remote, and that is part of its value. There are no roads, no towns and no large visitor centres on these islands. Most people arrive on expedition ships or small boats, often from Puerto Williams or from ports in Argentina. The emptiness is real. On a clear day, you may see nothing between you and the horizon except water, cloud and birds.

Before you walk back, take one more moment. Turn your face into the wind and notice its force. Look down at the moss beneath the boardwalk, then out to the grey water where two oceans meet. Sailors crossed this sea for centuries, and the Yaghan crossed it long before them. As you return to the shore, watch the albatross shape behind you, open against the moving sky.