Puerto Williams, Chile — the southernmost city on the planet — has a new landmark. Silversea officially cut the ribbon on The Cormorant at 55 South on November 5, a 150-room property that marks the luxury expedition line's first foray into hotels and a first for parent company Royal Caribbean Group too.
The hotel isn't a standalone vanity project. It's the new staging point for Silversea's Antarctica Fly Cruise program: every guest on those sailings now arrives in Puerto Williams on a Silversea-branded charter flight, beds down at The Cormorant, then boards ship from there. That skips the notorious Drake Passage crossing by sea in one direction, which is exactly the point — president Bert Hernandez framed the hotel as a way to make getting to Antarctica easier and more comfortable.
The season behind it is substantial. Silver Endeavour, Silver Wind and Silver Cloud are running 40 voyages through March 2027, 29 of them Antarctica Fly Cruises, with itineraries of six to 21 nights reaching beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to South Georgia and the Falkland Islands.
As for the hotel itself, Silversea has leaned hard into its location. The Latitude 55 restaurant builds menus around Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego traditions, including asado. Bar Sur pours Chilean wines from across the country in the evenings, with sommelier-led tastings and a guided pisco experience on the schedule. A Fireplace lounge, built around Patagonia's tradition of fire-side hospitality, looks out over the landscape through floor-to-ceiling windows.
Art from the region anchors the interiors: Paola Vezzani's steel sculpture Navarino hangs in the lobby, Cata Flaño painted a Dientes de Navarino mural for the bar, and Javier Canales contributed an installation of 70 handcrafted ceramic stones titled La Memoria de las Piedras.
There's also a reason to arrive early or linger after. Guests can kayak the Beagle Channel, hike shoreline trails at Seno Lauta, or explore on horseback — with decent odds of spotting cormorants, dolphin gulls and upland geese, the birds the hotel is named after.
Why it matters: for anyone weighing up an Antarctica trip, the fly-cruise format has always been the time-efficient option, and now the pre-cruise night comes with purpose-built accommodation instead of a transit stop. If Antarctica is on your list but a two-day Drake Passage toss is not, this development makes the shorter version considerably more appealing — and Puerto Williams itself, with its remote-edge-of-the-world setting, is more than just an airport waiting room.
Reporting by Cruise Industry News.
