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Faro Evangelistas

Natales, CL

The Evangelistas Lighthouse (Spanish: Faro Evangelistas) is one of the most exposed, isolated, and least accessible lighthouses in the world. Sited on the Evangelistas Islets on Chile's continental shelf in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean, it is the landfall light for ships crossing the Pacific east

wards to traverse the Strait of Magellan. A notable engineering accomplishment of its time, it was built by Scottish engineer George Henry Slight who had been recruited by Chilean President Jorge Montt, through the Chilean ambassador in London Agustin Ross, in order to establish a lighthouse service in Chile. Work on the lighthouse commenced on 30 April 1895. Slight's diary records his impressions of the Evangelistas on his arrival there: I never imagined seeing something so wild and desolate as those emerging dark rocks in the middle of the raging waves. To see these stormy craggy rocks was frightening. With a dim light on the horizon we could see large waves crashing heavily in the western part of the islands: a vision that hardly anyone can imagine... Slight had problems with bad weather, the supply of materials and equipment, unrest and lack of discipline among his workers, disease...

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