Paradise Harbour

Paradise Harbour is a sheltered embayment on the Danco Coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, cut into the western side of Graham Land between Duthiers Point and Leniz Point. Bryde Island and Lemaire Island close it off from the open water to the west, so the bay is calm more often than the channels around it, and the water mirrors the peaks and ice walls that rise on every side. Whalers working these waters in the early twentieth century gave it its name, which was already in use by 1920 — a rare moment of tenderness in a nomenclature full of capes and dangers.

The harbour is ringed by tidewater glaciers. Four of them, the Vivallos, Astudillo, Ice Gate and Suárez glaciers, flow down to the sea here, and their fronts calve regularly, sending a swell through the bay and leaving it strewn with brash ice and small bergs. Ice is almost always on the move between the mainland and the two islands. The shapes and blues of the floating ice, the sheer cliffs of the glacier fronts and the dark rock of the Kershaw Peaks to the south make it one of the great anchorages of the peninsula.

The bay has a human history too. The Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–99 passed this way, and later surveys were made by the Scottish geologist David Ferguson in 1913–14 and by Chilean expeditions around 1950. Two research stations stand on its eastern shore: Argentina's Brown Station, established in 1949–50, and Chile's Gabriel González Videla Station, whose 1950 shelter is protected as a historic site under the Antarctic Treaty. Seen from the water, their small buildings only emphasise the scale of the ice around them.

Getting there

Paradise Harbour lies far from any town: Ushuaia in Argentine Tierra del Fuego, about 1,150 km away, is the practical gateway, and Ushuaia – Malvinas Argentinas International Airport (USH) is the nearest airport with regular flights. Visitors arrive by sea on expedition cruises that sail from Ushuaia across the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula; landings and zodiac cruises in the harbour depend on ice and weather, and are arranged by the ship's expedition staff.