He never saw Punta Arenas, yet he stands in the middle of it. Magellan was a Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish Crown. In late October 1520 his fleet entered the passage he had been hunting for at the bottom of America, and only on 28 November did it come out into the ocean he called the Pacific. He named the passage the Strait of All Saints; the world later gave it his name.
The voyage was hard on everyone it touched. At San Julián, on the Patagonian coast, his men seized two Tehuelche men to take to the king: one escaped and the other died after refusing to eat. In the Strait itself the crew of the San Antonio mutinied and sailed back to Spain. Magellan was killed in battle at Mactan, in the Philippines, on 27 April 1521, and only the Victoria made it all the way round the world.
In 1920, for the fourth centenary, José Menéndez commissioned Guillermo Córdova's bronze monument in the Plaza Muñoz Gamero: Magellan standing on a cannon, hat in hand, with Indigenous figures at the base. The toe people kiss belongs to one of them. North of town, the Museo Nao Victoria has a full-size replica of his ship.
