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A Look At The Southernmost City In The World
And the argument surrounding the lucrative tourist marketing distinction
Finding out which city is the southernmost town in the world should be an easy task. Simply pull up their coordinates and see which one is the closest to the South Pole. Done. However, despite the ease of completing this task in the 21st century, there is some argument and tugging over the distinction of being the southernmost city in the world.
There are forty-eight cities with a thousand or more permanent residents that lay below the 45th parallel south. It is an exclusive club that only has settlements at the very bottom of the planet. In addition to that, there are a couple of dozen more military outposts and research stations in and around Antarctica that only have a handful of people on site at any given time.
Out of all of these places, there are two cities that insist they are the southernmost city on Earth: Puerto Williams, Chile, and Ushuaia, Argentina.
Unfortunately for the Argentinians, there can only be one city to hold this title and it is Puerto Williams.
A city at the bottom of the globe
The coordinates for Puerto Williams are 54°56′S 67°37′W making it the southernmost city in the world. The population is 2,800 and it is home to fishermen, ship captains, and military personnel. There is not much in or around Puerto Williams save for some maritime infrastructure maintained by Chile for the purposes of research, tourism, and military reach.
The city is on an island on the Beagle Channel and is the capital of Chile’s Antarctic Province. Recently, the town has enjoyed a relative boom. The population nearly doubled since the 1990s as the area became a popular jumping-off point for Antarctic tourists and researchers. Before that time the island was largely inhabited and run by the military alone.
Today, Puerto Williams enjoys extremely close proximity to Cape Horn and the Straights of Magellan which hold important commercial, historic and geographic…
