I made it to Puerto Santa Cruz, which is wind swept and desolate. I planned to spend a day here, but I must confess that it is going to be a very uneventful day because there is little to do. I read and played with my computer, but by 11 am I had cabin fever and had to go out. I am staying at a very nice A-frame cabin at the very entrance of the town, and from there I had the option of following the coast south to Puerto Punta Quilla (Keel Point) or go into downtown. So I headed for Keel Point, 10 km away, which is a restricted-entry naval port (the name comes from the fact that Captain Fitz Roy had to beach HMS Beagle here to replace the damaged keel; I feel as close to Darwin as I will ever be).
I found a friendly marine at the gate, who told me there was a pingüinera 4 km along the beach, so I parked just outside the gate and stepped in on foot to walk along the beach. It was tough going because the shoreline was strewn with cobbles, so I only covered a kilometer before taking the wise decision to head back (I could see far along the shore, and there was not a penguin in sight, so I did not have enough encouragement to keep going). I did cross over the bedrock for a few hundred meters, and found it to be a compact mudstone with lots of fossils of turritella, a coiled gastropod that in California is particularly indicative of the Miocene. I bet somewhere in those cliffs there is a whale skeleton to be discovered.
On the way back my friendly marine ambushed me and invited me to come into his post. Obviously he was lonely and welcomed the opportunity to talk. He was delighted to hear I was from Mexico, and a geologist, but most of the time he engaged on a long tirade about what is wrong with Argentina. He blames many of the ills of the country on the arrival of immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, and Perú, which the previous administration welcomed and supported with generous allotments (sounds familiar?). He has high hopes that new president Milei will stop that (another "populist" politician who is promising to "drain the swamp").
On a slightly more informative conversation, he told me some of what he knew about the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands), and the 1982 war. The traumatic event is plastered all over town, where old guns are used as public monuments, and where signs claiming Argentinian ownership of the islands are all over the place. That is because Puerto Santa Cruz is the closest to the Malvinas (650 km away), and it was the main port from which soldiers and munitions were deployed, and where many of the dead and wounded were brought back after the conflict.
The islands have been a hot potato since the first European, the French explorer Bougainville, set foot in them in 1764 and claimed them for France. The following year, 1765, Britain claimed them for itself, and a few years later Spain claimed them and managed to kick everyone else out of there (1776 to 1811). After the Spanish withdrawal, Argentina claimed them in 1820 but failed to establish permanent colonies there. In 1833 the Brits came back, just months before the arrival of HMS Beagle, which carried both Charles Darwin and Captain Fitz Roy and his guns. By 1845 an English colony had been established at Port Stanley, which the California Gold Rush soon made a bustling midway station for all sorts of people going to the goldfields. The shores of the Falklands were strategic locations for WW I and WW II.
Perón made a half-hearted attempt to buy the islands for Argentina in 1953 (and was laughed at by the Brits), and under the bravado of two different military juntas Argentina entered into military conflict with England in the late 1960's, and later in 1982. In both cases Argentina lost, but to this day still claims the islands belong to Argentina, and every year spins its diplomatic wheels repeating the claim. Argentina and Britain re-established diplomatic relations in the late 1990's.
In the meantime, the quasi-independent government of the Falklands has been a busy little bee promoting oil exploration in the offshore region, and has some promising prospects in a Jurassic failed rift to the north (not unlike the North Sea) and in Paleogene folded basins to the southeast and southwest. So far no big discoveries have been made, but exploration is in its early stages. The promise of petroleum deposits, gold deposits in the Proterozoic core of the islands, and the broad exclusive economic zone around the islands make it very unlikely that the Islas Malvinas will ever become part of Argentina.
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