Due to its particular morphology and explorable condition, this mount has become a landmark for landscape and tourism. Its peak gifts to those who reach it a generous shortcut to hidden landscapes.
Charles Darwin along with John Tarn, surgeon of the Beagle expedition, conquered this mount in 1834 during one of their explorations, aiming to find a generous viewpoint to admire the vastness of this new territory.
From here you can observe the mountain ranges of the Andes, the archipielagos emerging from the sea, the thick forest of Drymis winteri and the Strait of Magellan, unifying these elements of the landscape. Mount Tarn is visible from Punta Arenas, still grand and proud even from those 70 km of distance.
Georeading
Mount Tarn emerges isolated from the mountain ranges of the Magallanes Fold and Thrust Belt. Its peak is a shelter for fossils of ammonite, small molluscs that used to inhabit these lands over eighty million years ago, when the climate was warmer and the sea level higher.
The petrified relicts of the life and ecosystem of this ancient residents are today displayed as grey rocks that unfold on the peak of Mount Tarn and are revealed at the coast during the low tide.
Long ago, sand and living beings accumulated on the ocean floor. Time and their own weight transformed these disaggregated soils into solid rock.
Over sixty million years ago, this peaceful process was interrupted by formidable tectonic forces. Compression caused these rock layers to lose their horizontal, flat form, and like wrinkles on a canvas, topography uplifted from the bottom of the sea to the peak of Mount Tarn.