José Nogueira was born around 1845 in Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from Porto, and went to sea as a boy: a photo taken in Malta shows him as a cabin boy of twelve or thirteen. He reached Punta Arenas in 1866, when it was still a poor penal colony. He never learned to read or write.
He made money fast and the hard way. His schooners hunted fur seals on the Fuegian islets; he bought guanaco skins, fur capes and rhea feathers brought in by the Aónikenk; he salvaged wrecks, supplied ships and, from 1877, brought sheep over from the Falklands. In 1890 the government leased him about a million hectares in Tierra del Fuego, the land of the Selk'nam.
In 1887 he married Sara Braun, a young woman from a Jewish family from Courland who wrote his letters for him. He died of tuberculosis in 1893, aged about 48, before he could use that huge lease. Sara and her brother Mauricio turned it into the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego.
His name is still on the square: the Hotel José Nogueira runs inside the palace his widow built on Plaza Muñoz Gamero.
