#research base

San Martin Base

Situated in Marguerite Bay, south of the Antarctic Circle, San Martin is a year-round Argentine research base. When it was built in 1951, on the site of one of the BGLE bases from 20 years before that had been used to prove that the Antarctic Peninsula was part of the mainland and not an island, it was the first permanent human settlement south of the Antarctic circle.

They do research on meteorology, ionospherics and phytoplankton, amongst other things, and they were keen to share their work with us, as well as their little bar and remarkable museum.

Today it does not seem much less remote than it was back then. We received an astonishingly warm welcome, but an explanation came in the form of the visitors’ book, in which we saw that we were only the second ship to visit in the past year, with only a Royal Naval vessel providing any diversion from their research previous to our visit.