Perched on the northern shoreline of Isla Navarino in Chilean Tierra del Fuego, the 150-room lodge—which finally opened its doors earlier this month—is now officially the southernmost hotel on Earth. Named for the sleek, resilient seabird that nests along these subpolar cliffs (and situated right along the 55th parallel south), the property’s goal is to upend the prelude to polar travel completely. Rather than treating the tip of South America as a holding pen, Silversea has reimagined it as an alluring and deeply atmospheric destination in its own right.
Photo: Michel Verdure
The project began taking shape in late 2018, when Conrad Combrink, Silversea’s senior vice president of expeditions and destination development, flew across the Beagle Channel alongside the owner of DAP Antarctic Airways, an aviation partner that has become a close collaborator. Ushuaia, Argentina’s long-standing polar gateway, had grown intensely congested, and Combrink was scouting an alternative. He found it in Puerto Williams, a frontier outpost of roughly 2,000 residents that only recently received formal city status.
At the time, the settlement offered little beyond a modest wilderness lodge called Lakutaia, but the sheer drama of the landscape was impossible to ignore: tempestuous waterways, subpolar forests, and the saw-toothed granite ridges of the Dientes de Navarino rising sharply behind the bay. “I fell in love with it immediately,” Combrink tells me over Zoom, having just returned home to Miami after overseeing the property’s finishing touches. “Antarctica is an incredible journey, but historically everyone was subject to the same ordeal—multiple connection flights, low-cost charters, and very basic three-star accommodations at best. We wanted to solve that problem and take control of the entire guest experience.”
