It is one of the southernmost cities in the world, a gateway to Antarctica: Porvenir.

The streets are laid out in a quadrant pattern, as elsewhere in Chile, as an attempt at order, clarity and domination of a seemingly limitless territory.

But even a cursory glance at the small crooked single-family houses, cobbled together from wood and colored corrugated iron, with their junk-filled courtyards, betrays the contradiction.

Clothed windows, rusted sheet metal lying around in the yards, peeling walls eaten away by salt, right next to the split sidewalk a small tomb with a photograph of a boy circling in the grass, weathered by plastic toy excavators and trucks.

A street corner down, a giant chained stuffed tiger sits on an old oil barrel,

who guards the streets leading down to the sea.

The city was built in a narrow bay in hopes of being protected from the ruler of Tierra del Fuego on at least one side: the wind.

It's that freezing, relentless wind that's impossible to resist and that only eases a little at night.

In the January summer in Tierra del Fuego, the night lasts less than four hours, and the reverse is the case in August winter with the day.

From time to time one of the barely six thousand souls living here runs bent over and hidden behind an FFP2 mask across the street, disappears behind a squeaking door.

You only meet yourself, the wind and the dogs of Porvenir.

They lurk on every corner, are tame, quiet, run after the passers-by individually or in a pack for a while, then leave it and wait for the next summer, curled up on the side of the road.

Did they inherit this attitude from the people living here, or was it the other way around?

The fireman likes to open the door to the half-empty garage.

Two squads are currently in action;

two larger fires in the interior of the island and in the inaccessible, wooded south are currently being fought, and it is hoped that fire-fighting aircraft from the Patagonian mainland will soon help.

But you don't notice anything from the fires in Porvenir.

A 22,000 verse poem of humanity

After locking the garage again, the fireman walks with me around the corner to a small children's playground to join a few other residents of Porvenir to listen to short readings by some poets, speeches by the mayor, then by the director of the festival "Poetas" from Madrid, Pep Olona, ​​and finally by Julio Carrazco from the poet collective “Casagrande” from the capital Santiago de Chile, a good three thousand kilometers to the north.