Terra Incognita no longer

Another lure: The deep harbor is a major gateway to Antarctica, an increasingly hip destination for the environmentally inclined.

The almost honky-tonk ambience during high season takes some folks aback.

"I was expecting a desolate place at the End of the World," says James O'Sullivan, a New Yorker who visited this year. "But I got there and it was as jampacked as 42nd Street."

The helicopter-and-submarine-equipped yacht Octopus stopped by in February, bringing Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, and a multitude of crew, relatives and friends. Gates' associate Paul Allen, owner of the $200-million-plus Octopus, also was on board.

But the onslaught of world-end chic hasn't shattered the allure -- not yet, anyway. Although some unsightly development mars the town, nearby parks and waterways offer access to a largely unspoiled landscape of inlets and moorlands, forests and bays.

"There's something here that touches the imagination," says Gotz Bernau, violinist and concert-master of the Berlin Symphonic orchestra, seated at a picture window in a pricey hillside hotel as cottony snowflakes fell on the pines outside. "This could be Sweden or Switzerland. But you know it's the End of the World."

The Berlin Symphonic was the big draw at Ushuaia's third International Festival, a classical music extravaganza that is the centerpiece of the city's aggressive attempt to push the tourist season into the gray and chilly autumn, when an early dusk beckons and the streets empty. The orchestra played to packed audiences at a hotel ballroom in a city that still lacks a proper concert hall.

"People in Europe even want to have their honeymoons here," says Margarita Uliarte, a festival promoter from Austria.

World's End festivals -- arts, food, film, theater -- are metastasizing as city promoters sell a Third World alternative to Salzburg, Cannes and Sundance.

"We have broken the artistic stranglehold of Europe and the USA!" declares Leonor Amarante, Brazilian curator of the recently ended 1st Biennial of The End of The World, contemplated as a regular event. "The End of the World is the ideal place for artists to express concerns about the fate of humanity and our planet."

Exhibits included a stylized sunflower sculpture, dubbed a "sentinel" of climate change, and the Polar Project, a video installation featuring clips of humans standing on icebergs.