The massive fires that emerged from the island adverted the western explorers of the presence of the natives inhabiting the land. They baptised the island Land of Fire after the line of firelights that followed them as they navigated along the coast.
Also named Patagonia Fire, this was the millenary habitat of the selk’nam. It is also a transit landscape and a memory landscape, which hosts on its tensed, horizontal, and kilometric surface centuries of patrimonial relicts. In the pampa lie the remains of our natural and cultural inheritance, gifts of the ancestors such as arrow heads and conchales are spread through the land, along with anecdotes from the glacial past such as erratic blocks and fossils. These elements testify of a territory with history, where land, animals and men have coexisted, some cohabitating while some never running into each other. We are, after all, only an instant in the history of the Earth.
The pampa also hosts the productive landscape of the estancias, where flat land favours ovine production. This activity has also left behind an architectonic legacy that enriches the fueguian patrimony.
Georeading
The flat steppe is the wide territory that lies beyond the reach of the tectonic forces that uplifted the land. The surface, plane and undisturbed, is a sharp contrast to the rough topography of the Andes lying some kilometres to the south.
Places have identity, they are living beings that build themselves, react to the elements and relate to the foreign forces. The pampa has a mature, wise, character; during its long life of over 100 million years, it has been opening and filling with sediments that come from the mountains to the west and south. Through its lifetime it has been maturing, filling with experiences, layer after layer, always still and peaceful, while the mountains kept their unrest growth.
From its horizontal, low, viewpoint, the pampa observed the glaciers approaching and embraced their coldness. A deep basin that fills and dances at the rhythm of its partner, the unrest Andes, and still rests over the elastic lithosphere, relaxing and expanding, making space to fill with more sediments.