Journey to the cities at the end of the world

BarcelonaMedieval cartographers, when they reached the edge of a map and no longer knew what to draw, would write: Hic sunt dracones. “Here be dragons.” At that time, the world was not a perfect sphere, but a finite board where, if you strayed too far from the coast, you risked falling off the precipice. The path had ended, beyond lay only the void, the fog, and sea beasts.

Centuries have passed, we have learned that the Earth is round, and where ancient cartographers drew dragons out of fear of the void, we have gone and planted a lighthouse, a tavern, and a crazy desire to stay there. Therefore, today, our “dragons” are ice, freezing wind, or a jungle so thick it seems to want to devour cement. Cities like Longyearbyen or Nuuk are not just points on an Arctic map; they are the triumph of human stubbornness against the white void. To the south, Ushuaia, Invercargill, Hobart, or Cape Town function as the last balconies before the absolute silence of Antarctica. And then there is the mystery of Iquitos, a city that has decided to live isolated from the world behind an impenetrable wall of vines. We travel to the cities of “there is no beyond.” Where the compass goes crazy and the map ends, but where life insists on beating with a force that makes any medieval fear seem, today, like a simple bedtime story.

In the Norwegian archipelago of the Svalbard islands, at 78 degrees north, stands Longyearbyen: a city that is not explained, but lived. It is a tiny metropolis of 2,400 inhabitants where 53 nationalities coexist, united by the stubbornness of wanting to inhabit a place where nature invites no one. Here you leave home with a rifle on your shoulder –polar bears do not understand borders– and it is likely you will see reindeer grazing as you go to the supermarket. Longyearbyen reinvents itself in bars where you enter in socks to respect the mining tradition of not soiling everything with coal, and even death has its own rules: it is not allowed to die there because the permafrost refuses to decompose bodies. Many arrive for a year and stay for ten, trapped by the Arctic bug and toasts under the northern lights. Here, the end of the map is not a wall, but an invitation to live in the arms of the wildest nature.

If Longyearbyen is the wild frontier, Nuuk is unexpected sophistication. The capital of Greenland —the world’s largest island— has earned the title of the planet’s smallest metropolis, and it wears it with insolent elegance. Imagine a puzzle of colorful houses that look like Lego pieces scattered in front of a colossal fjord, where cutting-edge Nordic design coexists with the most deeply rooted Inuit culture. Here, icebergs drift past the window as you have a coffee, go to the cinema, or enjoy a concert. It is a city with a conscience, having become the first capital in the world with the EarthCheck sustainability certification, a reminder that living in such a vulnerable environment demands an absolute pact of respect with nature. In Nuuk, modernity has not killed the silence of the Arctic; it has merely given it a cosmopolitan soundtrack. Living there means accepting that you can be the center of the universe in a corner where nature still has the final say.

They say of Ushuaia –at the southern tip of Argentina, where the Andes mountain range definitively sinks into the ocean– that it is the city at the end of the world, but the Fuegians prefer to say that it is where everything begins. Ancient European navigators christened it Tierra del Fuego upon seeing the columns of smoke from the Yámana people who inhabited it, unaware that this "end of the world" would eventually become, for many, the beginning of everything. It is a city that has gone from being a fearsome penal colony to a magnetic refuge where nature overflows: you can be buying souvenirs on San Martín Street and, in ten minutes, find yourself at the foot of the Martial glacier and hear the ancient ice crackle. Ushuaia is a puzzle of glacial valleys and forests that seem to be taken from a fairy tale, a place where the penal past coexists with the luxury of tasting a king crab or Patagonian lamb with views of the Beagle Channel on one side and snow-capped peaks on the other. Here, the map does not end; it simply gains momentum to look towards Antarctica.

In Hobart, the world ends with a flourish. It is the last habitable frontier before the absolute silence of Antarctica, the point where land stops to give way to the open sea. Tasmania's capital has been sculpted by the brute force of Mount Kunanyi (Mount Wellington) and the Derwent River. It is Australia's second oldest city, but its spirit is ferociously young. Here, culture vibrates underground thanks to Mona, the contemporary art museum that has defied all the rules and put the island on the map. It is the place where you can go mountain biking in the morning and, as the sun sets, have a whisky next to a dinosaur fossil or within the walls of an old 19th-century hospital. Hobart is the ideal destination for those seeking to reach the end of the world without renouncing sophistication; a place where isolation has become the best excuse to create an oasis of vibrant and authentic life.

If you're looking for New Zealand's last breath before the ocean turns Antarctic, you'll arrive at Waihopai-Invercargill. It's a corner where summer resists leaving and the southern lights often paint the sky with impossible colors. But don't be fooled by its Maori name, which means “place of peace”. Beneath this calm of stately buildings and infinite parks like Queens Park, beats a noisy obsession with engines. Here, the figure of Burt Munro —the legend who broke speed records with his old Indian motorcycle— is almost sacred. Invercargill is the world's mecca for classic motoring, a place where you can get lost among museum vintage trucks or drive on the sand of Oreti Beach. It's the end of the world in its kindest version: a perfect square of wide streets where life runs unhurriedly, but with the engine always ready.

In Cape Town, isolation has a soundtrack: the roar of the colliding Indian and Atlantic Oceans. It is a city of fierce contrasts where you can go from the cosmopolitan bustle of the waterfront to the history-laden silence of Nelson Mandela's cell on Robben Island. But its magnetism always pulls downwards, towards the peninsula that narrows to a solitary lighthouse at Cape Point. Although the compass may say that the true southern tip of Africa is Cape Agulhas, the heart stays here, among penguins and gravity-defying cliffs. It is a city that lives with one foot on the fertile land of its ancient orchards and the other in the marine abyss. To experience its southern summer is to understand that the end of a continent is not a wall, but an immense opening to the unknown, a last frontier bathed in a light unlike any other.

If cities of ice are resistance, Iquitos is the celebration of the impossible. Located in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, it holds the title of being the largest city in the world without road access: here one arrives by air, seeing from the window how the Amazon coils like a golden anaconda, or by navigating for days through the jungle. It's a magnetic chaos of cumbia and mototaxis where the humidity embraces you without permission. The echo of the rubber boom still resonates in the mansions with Italian tiles and in the famous Casa de Fierro (designed by Eiffel), which defy oxidation and oblivion since the 19th century. Eating suri (forest worms), dancing with the Boras, or watching the sunset over the longest river on the planet from the malecón Tarapacá is to understand that isolation can be an exuberant celebration. In Iquitos, civilization has not ended; it has simply decided to live by its own rules, far from the conventional map.