We did not enter. On day 42, we ran out of fuel for our single camp stove. The satellite phone had been dead for weeks. We had built a signal fire on the highest point of the island—a ridge we named Mirador de la Agonía —using every piece of driftwood and non-essential gear.
We made it to shore: myself, Elías, a sound engineer named Petra, and a crate of emergency supplies meant for a weekend, not a month. The radio’s antenna sheared off during the evacuation. We had a satellite phone with 12% battery. I called my editor. I told him we were . stranded on santa astarta
Geologists would later theorize that Santa Astarta sits on a network of hollow lava tubes that act as a resonance chamber for deep-ocean infrasound. Elías had a different theory: “The tunnels under the church are not for storage. They are for escape. Something lives down there.” We did not enter
Geologically, Santa Astarta is a shield volcano remnant, consisting of one main island (Greater Astarta, roughly 11 miles long) and a series of razor-sharp sea stacks called Los Dientes del Diablo (The Devil’s Teeth). The island is covered in a dense, prehistoric-looking forest of subantarctic flora: leatherleaf, dwarf beech, and a carnivorous sundew that locals (before the place was abandoned) called Lágrimas de la Virgen . We had built a signal fire on the
If you are reading this because you typed the phrase “stranded on Santa Astarta” into a search engine, you are likely in one of three situations: you are a geography enthusiast, a writer of dystopian fiction, or—like me—you are currently out of drinking water, sharing a beach with penguins and a profound sense of regret. This article is for all of you. Here is everything I learned during my 47 days . The Enigma of Santa Astarta Let’s first establish where—and what—Santa Astarta is. Unlike its more famous cousin, the Chilean archipelago of Juan Fernández (of Robinson Crusoe fame), Santa Astarta is a phantom. It appears on exactly three pre-1920s Spanish naval charts and one corrupted satellite image from 2018.
My destination, however, was not a life raft. It was a speck on the map that cartographers seem to have forgotten: .