Long before the Europeans arrived, the territory of present-day Chile was home to a remarkable diversity of peoples adapted to extreme environments. The Monte Verde site, near Puerto Montt, is one of the oldest human settlements in the Americas, with dates of around 14,500 years that forced a rewriting of the theories about how the continent was peopled. On the northern coast, the Chinchorro culture was artificially mummifying its dead by around 5000 BC, two thousand years before the Egyptians, in what is the oldest known funerary practice of its kind.
The desert and highland north was home to the Aymara and the Atacameño, or Likan Antai, oasis farmers and caravan traders who inherited millennia-old cultures such as that of San Pedro de Atacama; alongside them lived the Quechua, the Colla and the Chango fishing people of the coast. In the transverse valleys of the Norte Chico the Diaguita flourished, famous for their finely decorated pottery. The Chilean state today officially recognises the Mapuche, Aymara, Rapa Nui, Atacameño (Likan Antai), Quechua, Colla, Chango, Diaguita, Kawésqar, Yagán and Selk'nam peoples.
The centre and south were the territory of the Mapuche — the most numerous, descendants of the Pitrén and El Vergel cultures — together with their Picunche branch to the north and Huilliche branch to the south. The Mapuche halted the expansion of the Inca empire in the fifteenth century and would resist the Spanish for centuries. Further south, in the forests and channels of Patagonia, canoe peoples such as the Chono, the Kawésqar (Alacaluf) and the Yagán navigated the waters; the Fuegian steppe was the land of the Selk'nam (Ona) and the Aónikenk (Tehuelche). And far out in the Pacific, remote Rapa Nui had been settled by Polynesian navigators who raised the colossal moai and developed the enigmatic rongorongo writing system.
The first European to venture into Chile was Diego de Almagro, who arrived from Cusco in 1536 after a punishing expedition across the altiplano and the mountains in which hundreds of indigenous people and Spaniards died. He found none of the gold he was looking for and returned to Peru disappointed, leaving behind a reputation of a poor land. The real conquest was undertaken by Pedro de Valdivia, who set out from Peru in 1540 with some 150 Spaniards and close to a thousand indigenous auxiliaries, accompanied by Inés de Suárez, and on 12 February 1541 founded Santiago del Nuevo Extremo on the banks of the Mapocho River.
Months later, in September 1541, the Picunche chief Michimalonco attacked and razed the infant city; Santiago survived thanks to the stubborn defence organised by Inés de Suárez. Painfully rebuilt, the town established itself as the head of the new territory. Valdivia pushed a policy of founding settlements to the south and to the north: La Serena (1544), Concepción (1550), La Imperial, Valdivia (1552), Villarrica and Angol, along with forts on the southern frontier.
The conquest soon ran into the obstacle that would define three centuries of history: the resistance of the Mapuche people south of the Biobío River. The Spanish imposed the encomienda system, which subjected indigenous people to forced labour, and searched for gold in the placer workings of the south. But the exploitation set off a general rebellion that would end with the death of the conquistador himself and with the establishment of a war frontier that no empire ever managed to erase completely.
In 1553, at the disaster of Tucapel, the young toqui Lautaro — who had served as Valdivia's page and knew Spanish tactics — laid an ambush, defeated the conquistador and killed him. It was the beginning of the War of Arauco, the longest conflict in the history of Spanish America. Lautaro came close to threatening Santiago before falling in 1557; other toquis such as Caupolicán and, later, Pelantaro kept the resistance alive. In 1598, after the disaster of Curalaba, a general uprising destroyed every Spanish town south of the Biobío.
The conflict was immortalised in 'La Araucana' by Alonso de Ercilla (1569-1589), one of the great epic poems of the Spanish language, which celebrated both the courage of the conquistadors and the heroism of the Mapuche. The Biobío River became a stable frontier: to the north, colonial Chile; to the south, an independent Araucanía. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, open war gave way to a mixed regime of skirmishing, cross-border trade, intermarriage and parlamentos — great diplomatic assemblies between Spanish authorities and Mapuche lonkos, such as the one at Quilín in 1641 — which amounted to a de facto recognition of indigenous autonomy.
This living frontier, unique in Spanish America, produced a society of forts, Jesuit missions and capitanes de amigos, the officers who acted as intermediaries, and a martial identity that would mark Chile. Mapuche independence south of the Biobío survived well into the republican era, and would end only with the Occupation of the Araucanía at the close of the nineteenth century.
For almost three centuries Chile was a poor, peripheral Captaincy General of the Spanish Empire, dependent on the Viceroyalty of Peru. Lacking the great silver deposits of Mexico or Potosí, its economy revolved around the agriculture of the haciendas of the central valley, which exported wheat, tallow and hides to Lima, and around extensive cattle ranching. Colonial society was rural and deeply hierarchical: at the top, Creole and Peninsular landowners; below them, tenant farmers, labourers, mestizos, indigenous people and a small minority of enslaved Africans.
Defending the territory consumed much of the country's resources. The walled city of Valdivia, refortified after the disaster of Curalaba, became one of the largest defensive complexes in colonial America, with the forts of Niebla, Corral and Mancera, paid for by the situado, the subsidy sent from Peru. The Chiloé archipelago was another southern bastion against English and Dutch privateers. The Catholic Church — and especially the Jesuits, until their expulsion in 1767 — played a central role in evangelisation, education and cultural life.
The eighteenth century, under the new Bourbon dynasty, brought a degree of prosperity and administrative reform: coins were minted, towns were founded, the Royal University of San Felipe opened (1747) and trade grew. A more enlightened Creole elite emerged, increasingly conscious of its own interests and resentful of the commercial monopoly and the power of Peninsular officials. Against that background of a local identity taking shape, the crisis of independence would break out in the following century.
The crisis of the Spanish monarchy, after Napoleon's invasion of 1808 and the captivity of Ferdinand VII, precipitated the break. On 18 September 1810 the First National Government Junta was formed in Santiago; it swore loyalty to the king but assumed power in practice, and that date is celebrated today as Chile's national holiday. So began the Patria Vieja (1810-1814), a period of first reforms — freedom of trade, a first National Congress, the freedom of wombs law that freed children born to enslaved mothers — and also of infighting among the patriot leaders, above all between José Miguel Carrera and Bernardo O'Higgins.
The royalist counter-attack, sent from Peru, crushed the patriots at the disaster of Rancagua (1-2 October 1814), where O'Higgins resisted heroically before having to break out of the siege. There followed the Spanish Reconquest (1814-1817), a period of harsh repression that drove the patriots into exile in Mendoza. There they joined the Army of the Andes being organised by José de San Martín, from the Río de la Plata, in one of the greatest logistical feats of the age: the crossing of the mountain range with thousands of men and artillery.
On 12 February 1817 that army defeated the royalists at the battle of Chacabuco, opening the way to Santiago; O'Higgins was named Supreme Director. Exactly one year later, on 12 February 1818, the independence of Chile was formally proclaimed. Emancipation was militarily sealed on 5 April 1818 at the battle of Maipú, after which O'Higgins and San Martín met in the celebrated 'embrace of Maipú'. The liberating squadron, under the command of Lord Thomas Cochrane, would later carry the war to Peru.
The first years of independent life were a period of institutional experiment. O'Higgins governed as Supreme Director until 1823, when he was forced to abdicate and leave for exile in Peru. There followed a phase of anarchy and short-lived constitutions, with liberals (pipiolos) pitted against conservatives (pelucones), until the battle of Lircay (1830) handed victory to the latter. On that victory was built the order that would define the century.
The key figure was Diego Portales, the powerful minister of President José Joaquín Prieto, who although never president himself organised a strong, centralised and authoritarian state. His work took shape in the Constitution of 1833, presidentialist and conservative, which governed Chile for almost ninety years and gave the country an exceptional stability in the turbulent Spanish America of the time. Portales was assassinated in 1837 during a military mutiny at Quillota, shortly before the war against the Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836-1839), which Chile won at the battle of Yungay and which consolidated its dominance in the South Pacific.
Under the conservative decenios, the ten-year presidencies of Prieto, Bulnes and Montt, Chile put its public finances in order, issued a Civil Code drafted by Andrés Bello, founded the University of Chile (1842) and the teacher-training Escuela Normal de Preceptores, and encouraged the wheat trade and the silver and copper mining of the Norte Chico. Towards the middle of the century a growing liberalism began to limit presidential power, part of public life was secularised and the electorate was gradually widened, in a transition towards the Liberal Republic.
The second half of the nineteenth century transformed both the map and the economy of Chile. In the Atacama Desert, then divided between Bolivia and Peru, Chilean and British companies were extracting guano and nitrate, fertilisers in high demand on the world market. When Bolivia imposed a new tax in 1878 in breach of the boundary treaty of 1874, the dispute escalated. In 1879 the War of the Pacific broke out, pitting Chile against the alliance of Peru and Bolivia.
After the naval campaign — marked by the battle of Iquique and the figure of Arturo Prat — and the land campaigns of Tarapacá, Tacna and Arica (where the Chilean army stormed the Morro headland in June 1880), Chile occupied Lima in 1881. The war ended with the Treaty of Ancón (1883), by which Peru ceded Tarapacá, and with a truce pact with Bolivia that left it without sovereign access to the sea. Chile doubled its northern territory and took possession of the greatest nitrate wealth on the planet.
Nitrate — 'white gold' — became the engine of the economy and of the treasury for almost four decades, with hundreds of company towns scattered across the Atacama and great fortunes made, many of them British. At the same time, to the south, the state undertook the Occupation of the Araucanía (1861-1883), led by Cornelio Saavedra, which put an end by force to Mapuche independence, founded towns such as Temuco and Victoria and opened the region to settlement by Chilean and European colonists. The south was also colonised by Germans (Valdivia, Osorno, Llanquihue) and effective possession was taken of the Strait of Magellan (Fuerte Bulnes, 1843). Within a few decades Chile had reached its present borders.
The wealth of nitrate coexisted with profound inequality. In the desert company towns and in the ports and cities, thousands of Chilean, Peruvian and Bolivian workers lived in brutal conditions, without labour rights or safety. Out of that reality came the so-called 'social question' and a powerful labour movement, with mutual aid societies, trade unions, mancomunales and the first socialist and anarchist organisations. Between 1902 and 1908 some two hundred strikes were recorded, and the repression produced bloody episodes such as the massacre at the Santa María school in Iquique in December 1907, where the army opened fire on thousands of striking nitrate workers, killing hundreds or thousands.
In politics, the struggle between President José Manuel Balmaceda — who wanted a more active state and to spend the nitrate revenues on public works — and Congress led to the civil war of 1891. After the bloody battles of Concón and Placilla, the congressional forces triumphed; Balmaceda took refuge in the Argentine embassy and killed himself on 19 September 1891, the day his term expired. The victory of Congress opened the Parliamentary Republic (1891-1925).
During that period a handful of oligarchic families dominated politics through an all-powerful Congress and a revolving door of unstable cabinets, while the 'social question' worsened and governments proved incapable of answering it. Figures such as Luis Emilio Recabarren emerged, founder of the Socialist Workers' Party and of the modern trade union movement. Social discontent and the paralysis of the parliamentary system prepared the ground for the arrival of new actors and for the end of an era.
The collapse of nitrate after the First World War — displaced by German synthetic nitrate — plunged Chile into a deep crisis and accelerated political change. Copper, worked by large United States companies at deposits such as Chuquicamata and El Teniente, replaced nitrate as the country's main source of wealth. In 1920 Arturo Alessandri Palma came to power with the support of the middle class and popular sectors, promising social reforms that the parliamentary elite blocked.
After a military intervention, a new Constitution was promulgated in 1925, presidentialist in character, which separated Church and state and enshrined new social and labour rights. Turbulent years followed — the authoritarian government of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, the brief Socialist Republic of 1932 — until politics settled around three great forces: the right, the Radicals and an increasingly organised left. In 1938 the Popular Front, a coalition of Radicals, socialists and communists, won with Pedro Aguirre Cerda under the slogan 'to govern is to educate'.
The Radical governments (1938-1952) drove state-led industrialisation — with the creation of the development agency CORFO in 1939 — and the expansion of education and health care. Citizenship widened: in 1949 women won the right to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections. In the 1960s, Eduardo Frei Montalva's Revolution in Liberty undertook the agrarian reform, which dismantled the old world of the haciendas, and the 'Chileanisation' of copper. Chile was living through intense politicisation, with demands from peasants, shanty-town dwellers and students that heralded the upheaval to come.
On 4 September 1970, Salvador Allende, candidate of the left-wing Popular Unity coalition, won the presidential election and was confirmed by a full session of Congress. He thus became the first Marxist in the world elected president by democratic means, and began the so-called Chilean road to socialism: a peaceful, legal transition towards socialism. His government fully nationalised copper — a law passed unanimously by Congress in 1971 — deepened the agrarian reform and took banks and industries into state ownership.
Political polarisation, shortages, runaway inflation, domestic conspiracy and pressure from the United States created a mounting crisis. On 11 September 1973 the armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, staged a coup d'état. The La Moneda palace was bombed from the air and Allende died inside it. A military junta was installed which dissolved Congress, banned political parties and unleashed systematic repression.
The dictatorship (1973-1990) carried out mass violations of human rights through the secret police (the DINA and later the CNI): according to the official reports, it left thousands executed and forcibly disappeared, tens of thousands tortured and hundreds of thousands in exile. In economic terms, a team of technocrats trained in Chicago — the 'Chicago Boys' — applied a radical neoliberal model of free markets, privatisation and trade liberalisation that transformed Chilean society from top to bottom. The Constitution of 1980, approved in a plebiscite held without guarantees, institutionalised the regime and set the rules for an eventual transition.
The Constitution of 1980 itself provided for a plebiscite in 1988 on whether Pinochet should continue. On 5 October of that year, against all predictions, the 'No' option won with around 56% of the vote, in a campaign remembered for its optimism ('joy is coming'). In 1990 Patricio Aylwin took office as the first president of the Concertación coalition, beginning the transition. The Rettig Commission documented the human rights violations, although justice advanced slowly and under the institutional constraints inherited from the regime.
The Concertación governments (Aylwin, Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Lagos and Bachelet) combined remarkable economic growth — which made Chile one of the most prosperous and stable economies in Latin America, with a sharp fall in poverty — with the persistence of deep inequalities and of a social model inherited from the dictatorship. Pinochet's arrest in London (1998) and the proceedings against him reopened the debate about the past. The right returned to power democratically with Sebastián Piñera in 2010, the bicentenary year and also the year of a devastating earthquake (magnitude 8.8) that struck the centre and south of the country.
That contrast between prosperity and inequality exploded in the estallido social, the social outburst of October 2019, with mass protests that shook the country and opened a constitutional process to replace the 1980 Constitution. The proposal drafted by the Constitutional Convention was rejected in the 2022 plebiscite (62%), however, and a second text, written by a council with a right-wing majority, was also rejected in 2023 (55.8%), closing the cycle without a new constitution. Chile — birthplace of the poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, a country of earthquakes and a world power in copper and lithium — remains a consolidated democracy carrying the memory of its recent past while it works out its future.
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The vast territory of Antofagasta is occupied by the Atacama Desert, the driest on the planet, with places where rain has never been recorded. Its oases were the cradle of the Atacameño or Likan Antai people, farmers, potters and caravan traders who between 500 BC and AD 1450 used their llamas to connect the coast, the puna and the altiplano. They left sites such as the Quitor pukará fortress, the village of Tulor and the rich grave goods found near San Pedro de Atacama.
Atacameño culture developed remarkable metalwork, basketry and weaving, and fell under the influence of the great Andean civilisations — Tiwanaku and finally the Inca empire, which absorbed the area into its road network. On the coast lived the Chango, fishers who sailed on rafts made of sea lion hide. That pre-Hispanic inheritance is still alive in the Atacameño communities of the interior.
Until 1879 much of this coast belonged to Bolivia, while Chilean and British companies extracted its nitrate and guano. The dispute over a new tax that Bolivia tried to levy on the Antofagasta Nitrate and Railway Company, in breach of the 1874 treaty, was the trigger for the War of the Pacific. On 14 February 1879 Chilean troops landed and occupied Antofagasta.
After the Chilean victory, and under the truce pact of 1884 and the treaty of 1904, the territory passed definitively into Chilean hands, leaving Bolivia without sovereign access to the sea — a dispute that continues to this day. The region became Chile's great mining district, first for nitrate and later for copper, and its capital, Antofagasta, grew into the main port and largest city of the north.
Antofagasta was born and grew to the rhythm of mining. First came nitrate; then copper. The Chuquicamata mine, near Calama, is one of the largest open-pit copper operations in the world, and together with Escondida and other deposits it makes the region the leading copper producer in Chile, which in turn is the world's largest producer of the metal, the backbone of the national economy.
From the 1980s onwards lithium extraction was added in the Salar de Atacama — one of the largest reserves on the planet, key to batteries and the energy transition — the first brine operation of its kind in South America. The city of Antofagasta, a major export port, and Calama, the copper capital, are the centres of a region where mining defines almost everything: the economy, the population and even a landscape reshaped by decades of extraction.
The oasis of San Pedro de Atacama is today the great tourist destination of northern Chile. From its adobe streets you reach landscapes from another planet: the Valle de la Luna, with its formations of salt and clay; the El Tatio geysers, one of the highest geothermal fields in the world at more than 4,300 metres; the high-altitude Miscanti and Miñiques lagoons with their flamingos; and the immense Salar de Atacama salt flat.
The town preserves its colonial adobe church and its Archaeological Museum, and works as a base for exploring hot springs, ayllus (ancient irrigation settlements) and salt flats. The combination of a living Atacameño culture, extreme landscapes and tourist comforts has made San Pedro a magnet for travellers from all over the world, and the starting point for crossings into the Bolivian and Argentine altiplano.
The extreme dryness, the altitude and the absence of light pollution in the Atacama Desert have made the region the world capital of astronomy. Some of the most advanced observatories on the planet stand on its hills and plains: the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory, and the great ALMA radio telescope on the Chajnantor plateau at 5,000 metres, an international project that scrutinises the cold universe and the formation of galaxies.
To these are added the astro-tourism of San Pedro and a growing number of observatories open to the public. It is estimated that in the coming decades a large share of the world's astronomical capacity will be concentrated in the skies of northern Chile. Desert, mining, Atacameño culture and stars make Antofagasta a genuinely unique region.
The Arica y Parinacota region holds one of the most astonishing archaeological legacies in the world: the mummies of the Chinchorro culture, coastal communities of fishers and gatherers in the Atacama Desert who by around 5000 BC were artificially mummifying their dead, some two thousand years before the Egyptians. That practice, the oldest known of its kind, reveals an elaborate cult of the dead and a deep knowledge of anatomy.
The first mummies were documented at the beginning of the twentieth century by the German archaeologist Max Uhle, and in the 1980s one of the richest sites, with close to a hundred bodies, was found on the slopes of the Morro de Arica. In July 2021 the settlements and the artificial mummification of the Chinchorro culture were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a recognition that confirmed Arica as one of the oldest cradles of humanity in the Americas.
The interior of the region is the ancestral domain of the Aymara people, who live on the Andean altiplano in villages such as Putre and Parinacota, farming terraces and herding llamas and alpacas at more than 3,000 metres above sea level. Their world view, their adobe and thatch Andean churches and their religious festivals — including the carnivals with tarka flute bands and dance troupes — are still fully alive throughout the foothills.
Between the coast and the mountains open the Azapa and Lluta valleys, irrigated oases that produce olives, tomatoes and the distinctive Lluta maize, and that also contain valuable pre-Hispanic geoglyphs. This coexistence of coastal desert, fertile valleys and Andean altiplano, with the Aymara and Chinchorro cultures layered on top of one another, gives Arica y Parinacota an exceptional historical and cultural density.
Arica was Peruvian territory until the War of the Pacific. On 7 June 1880, after the campaigns of Tarapacá and Tacna, the Chilean army stormed the Morro de Arica, the headland that towers over the city, in one of the most famous and bloodiest battles of the conflict, in which the Peruvian colonel Francisco Bolognesi was killed. The status of Arica and Tacna would remain unresolved for decades.
Under the Treaty of Ancón (1883) and, after a long dispute, the Chilean-Peruvian treaty of 1929, Arica passed definitively under Chilean sovereignty, while neighbouring Tacna returned to Peru. The city preserves unusual traces of that era, such as the church of San Marcos and the old Customs House, iron structures attributed to the workshop of the engineer Gustave Eiffel. Its mild, dry climate all year round earned it the nickname 'city of eternal spring'.
Towards the mountains, the region unfolds one of the most spectacular landscapes in Chile: Lauca National Park, a biosphere reserve lying at more than 4,000 metres, with the imposing Lake Chungará — one of the highest in the world — at the foot of the twin Payachatas volcanoes, Parinacota and Pomerape. Vicuñas, viscachas, flamingos, rheas and the elusive taruca deer inhabit this altiplano of bofedal wetlands and llareta cushion plants.
In the heart of the park, the village of Parinacota preserves a beautiful seventeenth-century Andean colonial church, a jewel of altiplano religious art. Together with the Las Vicuñas reserve and the Salar de Surire natural monument, Lauca makes the region the great gateway to high-altitude tourism in northern Chile, a territory of extreme beauty where the desert climbs until it brushes the sky.
The Atacama region, in Chile's Norte Chico, was for centuries home to the Diaguita people, notable for their fine polychrome geometric pottery and a point of contact between the Andean cultures of the north and the Mapuche world of the south. Its transverse valleys — Copiapó, Huasco — combine the driest desert in the world with river oases that made farming and mining possible from pre-Hispanic times, when the area came under the influence of the Inca empire, which built waystations and roads as it pushed south.
On the coast lived the Chango, fishers who sailed on rafts of sea lion hide and worked the rich shellfish and guano beds of the shoreline. The name of the region itself refers to the Atacameño people of the desert further north, although Atacama was above all Diaguita territory. When the Spanish arrived in the mid-sixteenth century, the Copiapó valley was the gateway to the kingdom of Chile: Diego de Almagro's expedition came down through it in 1536 and, later, Pedro de Valdivia's, after crossing the desert from Cusco.
In 1744 the town of San Francisco de la Selva de Copiapó was founded, and in 1789, on the orders of Governor Ambrosio O'Higgins, Vallenar was established in the Huasco valley. During the colonial era the region was the northern limit of the Captaincy General of Chile, a frontier mining land that already produced copper and gold, and that foreshadowed the vocation which would mark it forever.
Mining shaped the modern history of Atacama. The discovery of the immensely rich Chañarcillo silver deposit in 1832 by the muleteer Juan Godoy set off a silver rush that enriched Copiapó and a new class of mining entrepreneurs, and financed much of the country's development in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The city enjoyed an era of cultural and economic splendour, with theatres, printing presses and an intense social life fed by the silver of the desert.
That boom drove pioneering works: in 1851 the railway from Copiapó to Caldera was inaugurated, the first in Chile and one of the first in all of South America, promoted by the American businessman William Wheelwright to carry ore to the port. The region filled with smelters, and Copiapó came to host the School of Mines and to train the engineers who would modernise mining across the country.
That economic dynamism gave Atacama a strong regional consciousness and a deep resentment of Santiago's centralism, which taxed mining for the benefit of the capital. The grievance crystallised in the political conflict that broke out at the end of the 1850s, when the mining province rose in arms against the conservative government.
The wealth of silver gave Atacama the power to challenge the central state. In 1859 the mining province's discontent with the conservative government of Manuel Montt — which taxed mining in favour of Santiago and kept an iron grip on national politics — led to an armed revolution. Its leader was Pedro León Gallo, a wealthy mine owner from Copiapó who used his own fortune to arm, clothe and finance a genuine regional army, and even minted his own currency, the celebrated 'constituent peso'.
Gallo's revolutionary army won some victories in the north but was finally defeated by government forces at the battle of Cerro Grande, near La Serena, in April 1859. Although the uprising failed militarily, its political consequences were enormous: it precipitated the crisis and the end of the Conservative Republic and hastened the opening towards the Liberal Republic that would transform the country in the following decades.
The revolution of 1859 is remembered as one of the great regionalist rebellions in Chilean history, a symbol of the economic and political weight that the mining of the Norte Chico came to hold against the centralism of Santiago, and of a proud and combative Copiapó identity.
In 2010 Atacama was the setting for a story that moved the world. On 5 August a collapse at the San José copper and gold mine near Copiapó trapped 33 miners some 700 metres underground. After 17 agonising days without news, a borehole brought a handwritten message to the surface that travelled around the planet: 'All 33 of us are fine in the shelter'.
For 69 days Chile and the rest of the world followed the rescue operation. Finally, in October 2010, using the Fénix capsule designed specially for the task, the 33 miners were winched to the surface one by one in front of television cameras from dozens of countries, in one of the greatest mine rescues in history. The image of the last miner emerging from the shaft became a worldwide symbol of hope.
The episode projected Atacama and Chilean mining onto the global stage, inspired books and films, and lodged itself in the collective memory as a story of faith, solidarity and engineering. It was also a reminder of the enormous human cost that extracting wealth from the harsh Atacama desert has always carried.
The Atacama coast hides some of the most beautiful beaches in the country, led by Bahía Inglesa: transparent turquoise water and white sand beside the historic port of Caldera, an astonishing contrast with the desert that surrounds them. The coastal strip combines seaside resorts, artisanal fishing and a remarkable palaeontological heritage, with marine fossil beds that make this shoreline a treasure for science.
Caldera, the terminus of Chile's first railway, preserves a station and a railway and industrial heritage from the mid-nineteenth century, a testimony to the silver era. Around it lie coves of crystalline water and a coastal desert swept by the camanchaca, the Pacific fog that provides the only moisture in this rainless land.
And every few years, when unusual rains — often linked to the El Niño phenomenon — fall on the desert, the miracle of the desierto florido occurs: millions of dormant seeds germinate at once and cover kilometres of apparently dead sand and stone with purple, yellow and white flowers. It is one of the most astonishing natural phenomena on the planet, and for a few weeks it turns the driest desert on Earth into a blanket of colour.
The channels, fjords and forests of what is now the Aysén region were for millennia the territory of canoe peoples such as the Chono and the Kawésqar, who navigated among the islands of western Patagonia in boats of planks and bark, and of Tehuelche hunters on the eastern steppe. The first Europeans named these remote lands the 'Province of Trapananda', a name with legendary overtones for an almost unknown country.
For centuries this Patagonia of ice, rain and labyrinths of water remained outside the effective control of the Crown and later of the republic. It was explored by navigators such as Captain Robert FitzRoy, who sailed these coasts aboard HMS Beagle — with the young naturalist Charles Darwin — in the 1830s, and by Chilean sailors such as Enrique Simpson, who surveyed its channels and valleys at the end of the nineteenth century.
Isolated by the ice fields, the impenetrable forests and the fjords, Trapananda was one of the last regions effectively incorporated into Chile. Its remoteness and its extreme climate kept it almost unpopulated until the beginning of the twentieth century, when its settlement began, late and with difficulty.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Chilean state granted enormous land concessions to large livestock companies, such as the Sociedad Industrial del Aysén and the Compañía Explotadora del Baker, which introduced thousands of sheep and cattle into the steppe and the valleys. Alongside them, and often in conflict with them, came the first pioneer settlers, many of them from Argentina by way of the eastern side of the Andes, looking for free land on the last frontier.
Colonisation came at a very high ecological cost: to clear grazing land, the settlers set gigantic fires that burned for years and destroyed millions of hectares of native forest, changing the region's landscape forever and leaving the characteristic burnt trunks that still dot the valleys.
Tension between settlers and companies erupted in 1918 in the conflict known as the 'Chile Chico war', when people who had occupied land around Lake Buenos Aires (General Carrera) resisted attempts to evict them. That episode became a symbol of the pioneers' struggle for land and a landmark in the regional memory of Aysén.
With state support, the main settlements of the region took shape in the 1920s and 1930s. Puerto Aysén, founded in 1924 at the head of a fjord, became the great port of entry and exit for Patagonian livestock, while Coyhaique, founded in 1929 in an inland valley, grew over time into the regional capital and the main urban centre of Chilean Patagonia.
Since 1974 the region has carried the name of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, the president who pushed the integration of Patagonia, and was defined as the Aysén Region in the country's administrative divisions. Its population, always sparse, concentrated in Coyhaique and in small settlements scattered among mountains, lakes and fjords, in one of the least populated areas of Chile.
That recent history of hard, lonely pioneer settlement forged an Aysén identity proud of its origins, attached to the figure of the settler on horseback, to mate, to roast lamb and to life in a territory of overwhelming nature and extreme isolation, where the state and the connection with the rest of Chile arrived late.
The great milestone that transformed Aysén was the building of the Carretera Austral (Route CH-7), begun in the 1970s under the military dictatorship to connect the isolated settlements of Patagonia by land with the rest of Chile. This road, which runs more than a thousand kilometres from Puerto Montt to Villa O'Higgins through Valdivian rainforest, rivers, glaciers, fjords and ferry crossings, is today one of the most spectacular scenic routes in the world.
Before the road, much of Aysén could only be reached by sea or from Argentina; the new route finally broke the region's centuries-old isolation and opened its landscapes to visitors. Its construction, across terrain of extreme difficulty, was a genuine engineering epic that took years of work and cost a number of lives.
Driving the Carretera Austral is now one of the great adventure journeys of South America: every stretch reveals ancient forests, hanging glaciers, rivers of impossible turquoise and tiny villages where life follows the slow rhythm of Patagonia. The route is at once the backbone of the region and one of its greatest attractions.
Aysén preserves some of the most pristine landscapes on Earth. Lake General Carrera, the largest in Chile and the second largest in South America, shared with Argentina — where it is called Lake Buenos Aires — holds the Marble Chapels, rock formations sculpted by the water over millennia in blues and turquoises, visited by boat, one of the most astonishing natural spectacles on the continent.
The Northern and Southern Ice Fields, the largest masses of ice in the southern hemisphere outside Antarctica, spread across the region and feed glaciers that descend to the fjords. Among them stands out the hanging glacier of Queulat, a tongue of ice suspended between mountains from which waterfalls drop into the void, at the heart of a national park of evergreen forest.
Parks such as Queulat, Laguna San Rafael — with its glacier that calves into the sea — and Patagonia Park, together with rivers legendary among anglers such as the Baker and the Futaleufú, make Aysén a sanctuary of untouched nature. This is Patagonia in its purest state: ice, water, forest and silence at the end of the world.
For almost three centuries the Biobío River was the most famous frontier in Chilean history: to the north, colonial Spanish Chile; to the south, the independent Araucanía of the Mapuche people. That line defined the very long War of Arauco, which began after the death of Pedro de Valdivia at the hands of the toqui Lautaro in 1553, and sustained a world of forts, missions, cross-border trade and parlamentos between Spaniards and Mapuche lonkos.
Along the Biobío rose a chain of strongholds and towns — Los Ángeles, Nacimiento, Yumbel, Santa Juana — which defended the frontier and at the same time traded with the indigenous world. After the disaster of Curalaba (1598) and the destruction of the southern cities, the Biobío frontier settled into a living boundary, crossed by capitanes de amigos, Jesuit missionaries and intense intermarriage and exchange.
That condition of a frontier land over centuries forged a martial, mestizo identity that runs through the history and culture of the region. The Biobío was not only a river: it was the great threshold between two worlds that lived side by side, traded and fought across generations, in the longest epic of Spanish America.
Concepción was founded by Pedro de Valdivia on 5 October 1550 — after work began in March on a fort in the Penco valley — under the name Concepción del Nuevo Extremo, as the great military base of the Spanish advance southwards. Lying just north of the frontier with the Mapuche, it was for centuries the second city of the kingdom and was even the capital of Chile between 1565 and 1575, seat of the Royal Audiencia and of the frontier army.
The city endured a tormented history of earthquakes and tidal waves that destroyed it again and again on its original site at Penco; after the devastating earthquake and tsunami of 1751, it was finally moved in 1764 to its present location in the Mocha valley, beside the Biobío. From there it grew once more into the great centre of southern Chile.
Concepción played a prominent part in independence: it was there that O'Higgins first proclaimed emancipation in 1818. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it consolidated its position as Chile's second metropolitan area and the industrial, port and university heart of the south.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Biobío region became one of Chile's great industrial poles thanks to coal. Extraction began at Lota around 1852 and spread around the bay of Concepción and the Gulf of Arauco, concentrating at Lota and Coronel, whose legendary mine galleries ran for kilometres out under the sea. The Cousiño family built a coal empire there, along with the famous Lota Park, a jewel of nineteenth-century gardening.
Coal gave rise to a working-class world of great social and political intensity. The coal miners, labouring in brutal conditions beneath the sea, led some of the most important union struggles in Chilean history and fed the labour movement and the left. That mining universe was immortalised in the writing of Baldomero Lillo, author of 'Sub Terra', who portrayed the hell of the pits.
The closure of the coal mines in the 1990s plunged Lota and Coronel into a deep crisis, leaving an impressive industrial heritage — Lota Park, the Chiflón del Diablo gallery, the workers' housing blocks — now offered to visitors as a testimony to a heroic and harsh era of Chilean social history.
Concepción and its port of Talcahuano grew as a major industrial and steel-making centre — with the Huachipato steelworks, a symbol of the state-led industrialisation driven by CORFO in the mid-twentieth century — and above all as a university hub. The University of Concepción, founded in 1919 by Enrique Molina, with its emblematic bell tower and its Casa del Arte holding the mural 'Presencia de América Latina' by the Mexican Jorge González Camarena, stamped the city with a strong cultural and student character.
That university vitality made Concepción a young, intellectual and rebellious city, the cradle of political and cultural movements. In the 1980s and 1990s it became the epicentre of Chilean rock: bands such as Los Tres, Emociones Clandestinas and Machuca emerged from its neighbourhoods and universities, giving 'Conce' its reputation as the national capital of rock.
Today Greater Concepción, with close to a million inhabitants, is Chile's second urban area and the great engine of the south, combining industry, ports, universities and an intense cultural life. Its urban, young and creative character contrasts with the rural and mining world around it, in a region of enormous contrasts.
South of the Biobío lies the province of Arauco, the historic heart of Mapuche resistance that gave the War of Arauco its name and that Alonso de Ercilla immortalised in his epic poem 'La Araucana'. Cañete, Lebu, Contulmo and Lake Lanalhue preserve a strong Mapuche-Lafkenche presence — the 'people of the sea' — and a landscape of forests, coast and the Nahuelbuta range.
In modern times this area became one of the great centres of the Chilean forestry industry, with enormous pine and eucalyptus plantations and pulp mills that reshaped both the landscape and the economy. That forestry model, established on land subject to historic Mapuche claims, lies at the centre of the land conflict between communities, companies and the state, one of the great issues of contemporary Chile.
The Nahuelbuta range, with its coastal araucaria forests and the national park of the same name, and the Arauco coast, with its fishing coves and wetlands, complete a territory of great beauty and historical density, where the warrior past of the frontier is still alive in memory and in the conflicts of the present.
Like the whole of south-central Chile, the Biobío region is deeply seismic. In 1939 the violent Chillán earthquake flattened much of Concepción, Chillán and the neighbouring cities, leaving tens of thousands dead and prompting the creation of CORFO for the country's reconstruction and industrial development.
On 27 February 2010, one of the largest earthquakes in Chilean history — magnitude 8.8, centred off the coast of the Maule and Biobío — followed by a devastating tsunami, struck the region with enormous force. Concepción, Talcahuano, Dichato and dozens of coastal towns suffered destruction, and the whole country lived through weeks of emergency. Reconstruction shaped much of the following decade.
This seismic condition, the legacy of the collision of the Nazca and South American plates off its coast, has forged in the region — as across Chile — a culture of resilience and rebuilding. Time and again the Biobío has found the strength and the organisation to rise from catastrophe, in a land that has always lived with the trembling of the ground.
The Coquimbo region, with its fertile transverse valleys between the desert and central Chile, was the territory of the Diaguita people, famous for their fine pottery decorated with geometric motifs, and came under Inca influence before the Spanish arrived. The city of La Serena, founded by Juan Bohón in 1544 on the orders of Pedro de Valdivia and refounded by Francisco de Aguirre in 1549 after an indigenous attack, is the third oldest in Chile.
Battered by pirate raids — such as that of the English privateer Bartholomew Sharp in 1680, who burned it — and by indigenous uprisings during the colonial period, La Serena later flourished on the silver and copper mining of the nineteenth century, which left churches and stately townhouses. Its mining, farming and port vocation made it the great centre of the Norte Chico.
In the twentieth century, President Gabriel González Videla — born in the city — drove the so-called Plan Serena (1948-1952), an ambitious urban renewal programme that gave La Serena its distinctive neocolonial architecture, with orderly streets, Spanish-style public buildings, gardens and numerous churches, earning it the nickname 'city of churches'.
Today La Serena, together with its twin city and port of Coquimbo, forms the second most populous urban area in northern Chile and a destination of beaches, resorts and heritage, and a base for exploring the inland valleys and the skies of the region. Its Avenida del Mar is the focus of summer life in the Norte Chico.
Inland opens the Elqui Valley, one of the brightest and most singular corners of Chile. Its terraced slopes, watered by the Elqui River and its reservoirs, produce the muscat grapes from which pisco is distilled, the national spirit with its own protected designation of origin, in villages such as Pisco Elqui and Vicuña, an inheritance from a winemaking tradition that goes back to the colonial era.
The valley is also the birthplace of Gabriela Mistral, born in Vicuña in 1889, a rural schoolteacher who in 1945 became the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her figure, her birthplace and her tomb at Montegrande permeate the whole district. To that poetic fame is added a mystical one: the Elqui is known for its supposed 'special energy' and for its skies, which draw spiritual seekers, artists and travellers from all over the world.
The clean, dry, cloudless skies of Coquimbo have made it one of the world capitals of astronomy. Some of the most important observatories on the planet stand on its mountains — Cerro Tololo, La Silla, Gemini South and the great Vera Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón — all of them exploiting the exceptional transparency of the Norte Chico sky.
The Elqui Valley has also seen astro-tourism flourish, with observatories open to the public such as Mamalluca, where visitors can take in some of the most impressive starry skies on Earth. The combination of beaches at La Serena and Coquimbo, green pisco-growing valleys, historic villages and unmatched skies makes this a region that unites nature, culture and science as few others do.
La Araucanía is the historic heart of the Mapuche people, who for almost three centuries kept their independence south of the Biobío River, resisting first the Incas and then the Spanish in the long War of Arauco. No other indigenous nation in the Americas held off the European advance for so long, sustaining a frontier that the Spanish Crown recognised in practice at great assemblies such as the parlamento of Quilín (1641).
That autonomy rested on a social organisation based on lof (communities), rehue and ayllarehue, brought together in wartime under an elected toqui. The Mapuche developed formidable military skill — adopting the horse and European tactics — and a livestock and trading economy that connected them to the Spanish world and to the Argentine pampa through the mountain passes.
During the colonial period and the first decades of the republic, the Araucanía was frontier territory, with intense trade, intermarriage and missions, but also with periodic uprisings and raids. The Biobío River remained the de facto boundary between republican Chile and the free Araucanía until well into the nineteenth century.
From 1861 the Chilean state undertook what it called the 'Pacification', or Occupation, of the Araucanía: a process of military conquest, colonisation and annexation of the Mapuche territory between the Biobío and Toltén rivers, led by officers such as Cornelio Saavedra and Gregorio Urrutia. A line of forts was built that advanced southwards, towns such as Angol, Traiguén, Victoria and Lautaro were founded, and communities were forcibly moved into reducciones, or reservations.
In January 1881, taking advantage of the fact that Chile was at war in the north, the Mapuche of Malleco staged the last great general uprising, attacking forts and towns such as Traiguén, Lumaco and Collipulli. The repression was harsh and, on 24 February 1881, Chilean troops crossed the Cautín River and founded the fort of Temuco, sealing the occupation, which was completed in 1883 with the refounding of Villarrica.
The consequences for the Mapuche people were devastating: they lost more than 90% of their territory, were confined to reservations and suffered famine and epidemics that killed thousands. The 'freed' land was auctioned off and handed to Chilean and European settlers, sowing a conflict over land that continues to this day.
Temuco, the regional capital founded in 1881 at the end of the occupation, is the great urban centre of La Araucanía and a meeting point between the Mapuche and Chilean worlds. Its Municipal Market and the Pinto fair overflow with country produce, medicinal herbs, merkén smoked chilli, silverwork and textiles, and in the city and its surroundings the Mapuche presence is stronger than in any other region of the country. The poet Pablo Neruda spent his childhood in Temuco.
Mapuche culture — its language, mapudungun; its world view; its silverwork, weaving and cooking — remains fully alive in the rural communities of the region, with their ruka houses, their nguillatún ceremonies and the figure of the machi, the spiritual authority and healer. It is the largest and most vital indigenous culture in Chile, in permanent dialogue and tension with the state.
The region is also the central stage of the current Mapuche conflict over the recovery of ancestral land, a process that since the Nueva Imperial Agreement (1989) and the creation of the indigenous development agency CONADI has sought political channels, but which remains marked by unresolved historical claims. It is impossible to understand La Araucanía without understanding that long history of resistance, dispossession and persistence.
The Andean side of La Araucanía is one of the most beautiful parts of Chile. Pucón, on the shore of Lake Villarrica and at the foot of the volcano of the same name — one of the most active in South America, crowned by a permanent plume of smoke and a lava lake in its crater — is the adventure tourism capital of the south: climbing the volcano, rafting on the Trancura River, canopy tours, skiing and dozens of natural hot springs fed by volcanic heat.
This country of lakes and volcanoes, which continues southwards into the Los Ríos and Los Lagos regions, forms part of the great Chilean Lake District, a landscape of clear water, forests and snow-capped cones that draws travellers from all over the world. Villarrica, Caburgua and other lakes offer beaches, boating and rest in a mountain setting.
The Villarrica volcano, which has erupted repeatedly through history, and its neighbours Llaima, Lonquimay and Lanín give the region a volcanic character that combines with the green of the forests and the blue of the lakes, in one of the most photographed landscapes in Chile.
The forests of the region are dominated by the araucaria or pehuén, the monkey-puzzle tree sacred to the Pehuenche people — the 'people of the pehuén', the mountain branch of the Mapuche — whose ancient specimens, some more than a thousand years old, are protected in national parks such as Huerquehue, Conguillío, Tolhuaca and Nahuelbuta. Its seed, the piñón, is a central traditional food in the Pehuenche diet, gathered in the mountains every autumn.
The araucaria, with its unmistakable umbrella silhouette and scaly foliage, is a relict species from remote times, a natural monument of Chile and a symbol of the Andean south. The forests it forms, together with the Llaima and Lonquimay volcanoes and lakes of crystalline water, make up some of the most impressive landscapes in the country, such as Conguillío National Park with its volcano, its araucarias and its lakes of volcanic origin.
Those ancient forests, charged with spiritual meaning for the Pehuenche people, are the great natural treasure of La Araucanía. To walk through them is to enter an older world, where nature and Mapuche culture are woven together in a territory of a beauty and depth unique in Chile.
This region carries the name of Bernardo O'Higgins, the foremost hero of Chilean independence and its first Supreme Director. Its territory, in the heart of the central valley watered by the Cachapoal and Tinguiririca rivers, is the core of rural, traditional Chile: a land of colonial estates, of huasos — the horsemen of the Chilean countryside — of rodeos and of the criollo culture that defines a large part of the national identity.
From colonial times, the fertile Cachapoal and Colchagua valleys filled with great wheat and cattle estates, whose tenant farmers and labourers shaped the rural world that still survives today in festivals, food and customs. Farming life marked the region so deeply that its people retain a strong attachment to country traditions, from the asado barbecue and chicha cider to the huaso's dress.
That rural inheritance, combined with the historical weight of the independence struggle fought here, makes O'Higgins one of the most recognisable cradles of chilenidad, where a landscape of vines, hills and fields still evokes the deep, traditional Chile.
Rancagua, the regional capital, was the scene of one of the most heroic and tragic episodes of Chilean independence: the disaster of Rancagua, on 1 and 2 October 1814. There, Brigadier Bernardo O'Higgins was besieged by the royalist troops of Colonel Mariano Osorio and held out for two days in the town square, waiting in vain for reinforcements that never came. With his ammunition gone, O'Higgins broke through the encirclement at the head of a handful of survivors and fled towards Mendoza.
The disaster of Rancagua ended the Patria Vieja and opened the grim period of the Spanish Reconquest (1814-1817), during which the patriots had to go into exile in Mendoza, where they would join José de San Martín's Army of the Andes to return and liberate Chile. The stand at Rancagua was engraved in memory as a symbol of independence-era courage, and the city still carries that historical weight in its square and its church of La Merced.
Today Rancagua is the region's urban and service centre, and each year it hosts the National Rodeo Championship in its Medialuna Monumental arena, the great gathering of Chile's huaso tradition. The city thus combines the memory of the patriotic struggle with the vitality of the country culture around it.
In the mountains near Rancagua lies El Teniente, the largest underground copper mine in the world, whose galleries run for hundreds of kilometres beneath the rock. Large-scale exploitation began in the early twentieth century with United States capital, making the region one of the great copper centres and a pillar of the Chilean economy, until nationalisation in 1971.
Beside the mine, clinging to the mountainside at more than 2,000 metres, stood the mining camp of Sewell, nicknamed the 'city of stairs' because, with no streets for vehicles, its inhabitants moved along a great central staircase and a tangle of walkways and brightly painted wooden buildings. It housed as many as 15,000 people and was a genuine town in the high mountains.
In 2006 Sewell was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site as an exceptional example of a twentieth-century mining company town. Uninhabited today and turned into an open-air museum, it is one of the region's great heritage attractions, a frozen testimony to the epic of Chilean copper.
The Colchagua Valley, around the town of Santa Cruz, is one of the most prestigious wine regions in Chile and in South America, celebrated above all for its full-bodied reds — cabernet sauvignon, carmenère, malbec and syrah — favoured by a warm Mediterranean climate and a long tradition of viticulture. Its wine route, the first in the country, brings together more than a dozen world-renowned wineries open to visitors, with tastings, hotels and first-class restaurants.
Santa Cruz, the heart of the valley, has become a highly attractive wine and cultural destination, with its stately square and the remarkable Colchagua Museum, one of the most important in Chile for historical and archaeological collections. The vineyard landscape around the town, with the coastal range in the background, has a serene beauty that is much photographed.
Colchagua has been internationally recognised as one of the great wine valleys of the New World, and its combination of excellent winemaking, huaso tradition and landscape has made this part of the O'Higgins region a showcase of rural, gourmet Chile.
On the coast, Pichilemu is the surfing capital of Chile and one of the meccas of the sport in South America. Its wave at Punta de Lobos, one of the longest and most imposing in the country, draws surfers from all over the world and hosts national and international big-wave contests, in a spectacular setting of cliffs and rock stacks battered by the Pacific.
A traditional resort since the beginning of the twentieth century, when the businessman Agustín Ross Edwards gave it an elegant park, a casino and European-style buildings to attract Santiago's aristocracy, Pichilemu preserves from that belle époque a singular architectural heritage beside the sea. Ross Park and its stairways bear witness to that first seaside splendour.
Today Pichilemu lives mainly on surfing and tourism, with a bohemian, sporty atmosphere that attracts young people from all over Chile. Its black sand beaches, its sunsets and the constant roar of the waves make this corner of the O'Higgins region a destination unlike any other on the Chilean Pacific coast.
The Los Lagos region, around the great Lake Llanquihue — the second largest in Chile — was the territory of the Mapuche-Huilliche. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Chilean state promoted intense German colonisation here, managed by Vicente Pérez Rosales: immigrant families cleared the forest by fire, founded or settled towns such as Puerto Montt (1853, named after President Manuel Montt), Puerto Varas, Frutillar, Puerto Octay and Osorno, and built a prosperous farming and industrial economy.
That German legacy is still visible today in the shingled architecture with its turrets, in the pastries of küchen and strudel, in the churches and cemeteries and in the central European atmosphere of towns such as Frutillar, home to a celebrated classical music festival — the Semanas Musicales — beside the lake with the Osorno volcano behind it.
Puerto Varas, the 'city of roses', has become the tourist capital of the region and the base for exploring the Osorno volcano, the Petrohué falls, the emerald Todos los Santos lake and Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park, the oldest in Chile (1926). The landscape of lakes and perfect volcanic cones recalls the Alps, with an atmosphere all of its own.
From Puerto Montt, the regional capital and a major port, the legendary Carretera Austral heads south, along with the ferries that thread into the fjords and channels of Patagonia. The region is thus the great gateway to Chilean Patagonia, where the landscape of lakes and volcanoes gives way to rainforest, fjords and the ice of the far south.
The Chiloé archipelago, the island heart of the region, is a world apart, with a culture of its own forged over centuries of isolation and of mixing between Huilliche and Spanish. It was Chile's last royalist stronghold and joined the republic only in 1826. Its wooden churches, built by Jesuits, Franciscans and Chilote master carpenters between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000.
The palafitos — wooden houses on stilts at the water's edge — of Castro are one of the most recognisable images of southern Chile. The island preserves a rich mythology peopled by beings such as the Trauco, the Pincoya, the Fiura and the ghost ship Caleuche; a cuisine centred on the curanto, cooked in a pit with hot stones; and a strong identity forged between the sea, the potato — Chiloé is one of the world centres of origin for the crop, with hundreds of varieties — and wood.
The region also reaches into the deep south of the mainland, with the Cochamó area and its valley of granite walls — nicknamed the 'Chilean Yosemite' — the fjords of northern Patagonia and Pumalín Douglas Tompkins Park, a great conservation project donated to the state that protects extensive alerce forests and Valdivian rainforest.
In its economy, alongside tourism and livestock, Los Lagos is the epicentre of the Chilean salmon industry, which has made the country one of the largest salmon producers in the world, with all its environmental light and shade. From Lake Llanquihue to the channels of Chiloé and the Carretera Austral, the region condenses much of the magic of southern Chile.
Valdivia, founded by Pedro de Valdivia in 1552, is one of the oldest cities in Chile and one of the few in the south that the Spanish managed to hold against Mapuche resistance, although it was left as an isolated enclave after the uprising of 1598. Because of its strategic value as a port on the Pacific route, and for fear of rival powers, the Crown protected it with one of the largest defensive systems in colonial America: the forts of Niebla, Corral, Amargos and Mancera island, which still stand today.
In 1820, during the wars of independence, Lord Thomas Cochrane, commanding the patriot squadron, took those supposedly impregnable fortifications by surprise in a daring amphibious operation that deprived Spain of its last great stronghold in southern Chile, a decisive blow for the consolidation of independence.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Valdivia and its surroundings received a large wave of German immigration, promoted by the state through agents such as Vicente Pérez Rosales, which transformed the region. The settlers set up industries, tanneries, mills, shipyards and, above all, breweries that made Valdivia the historic beer capital of Chile, a tradition revived today by its Bierfest and an active craft brewing scene.
The river city, crossed by the Calle-Calle, Valdivia and Cruces rivers, is famous for its Mercado Fluvial, the riverside market where sea lions wait for the fishermen's scraps, and for its prestigious Universidad Austral, a scientific benchmark in the south of the country. Its shingled architecture and central European atmosphere give it an unmistakable character.
On 22 May 1960 the most powerful earthquake ever recorded by human instruments, magnitude 9.5, had its epicentre off Valdivia. The Great Valdivia earthquake and the tsunami that followed devastated southern Chile, killed thousands and sent waves across the Pacific as far as Hawaii and Japan.
The cataclysm reshaped the geography of the region: it sank land, altered the course of rivers and created wetlands such as the Cruces river sanctuary. The event was burned into the collective memory and made Valdivia a worldwide symbol of the seismic force of Chile, one of the most earthquake-prone countries on the planet.
The Los Ríos region, created in 2007 when it separated from the Los Lagos region, preserves part of the temperate rainforest known as the Valdivian jungle, one of the most biodiverse and singular ecosystems on the planet, with species such as the ancient alerce cypress, the ulmo, the olivillo and the pudú, the smallest deer in the world. Alerce Costero National Park protects alerce trees thousands of years old.
Inland opens the great Lake Ranco, one of the largest in Chile, with towns such as Futrono and Lago Ranco, strongly Mapuche-Huilliche in tradition, which serve as gateways to the Seven Lakes route and the mountains. Rivers, lakes, native forest and hot springs define this region of water and deep green, among the rainiest and most luxuriant in the country.
The far south of Chile was for millennia home to extraordinary indigenous peoples: the Selk'nam (Ona) and the Aónikenk (Tehuelche), hunters of the Fuegian and Patagonian steppes, and the canoe peoples, the Kawésqar (Alacaluf) and the Yagán, who navigated the freezing southern channels half-naked, always keeping a fire alight in their boats. It was those fires, seen at night by passing sailors, that gave Tierra del Fuego its name.
In 1520 the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in the service of the Spanish Crown, crossed for the first time the strait that now bears his name, joining the Atlantic and the Pacific and opening the route of the first circumnavigation of the globe. For centuries that remote and feared passage, lashed by wind and storms, was the only sea route between the oceans and a myth among sailors, until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.
Chile took effective possession of the strait in 1843 with the founding of Fuerte Bulnes on the orders of President Manuel Bulnes; the settlement moved in 1848 to a better site, giving rise to Punta Arenas, the great port of the far south. Before the Panama Canal opened, every ship travelling between the oceans passed through the strait, and Punta Arenas flourished as a cosmopolitan and opulent city.
Its prosperity was built on sheep farming: after the first land auction of 1884, enormous estates of tens of thousands of hectares exported wool to the world, in the hands of powerful families and companies such as the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego. That boom brought Croatian, British, Spanish and other European immigrants, and left the palaces and the monumental cemetery that still adorn Punta Arenas. It also had an appalling side: the expansion of ranching and the policy of estate owners and settlers led to the genocide of the Selk'nam, who were almost exterminated by manhunts, deportations and epidemics within a few decades.
The natural jewel of Magallanes is Torres del Paine National Park, a biosphere reserve and one of the most famous trekking destinations on the planet, repeatedly voted one of the natural wonders of the world. Its granite towers and horns, its glaciers calving from the Southern Ice Field, its turquoise lakes and its wildlife — guanacos, rheas, condors, flamingos and the elusive puma — draw travellers from all over the world every year to walk the W and O circuits. Puerto Natales, on the shore of the Última Esperanza sound, is its gateway.
The park combines Patagonian steppe, southern forests, glaciers and glacial rivers in a landscape of overwhelming scale and beauty, the symbol of Chilean nature tourism in the south of the continent.
The region also takes in the Chilean part of the main island of Tierra del Fuego — shared with Argentina — with Porvenir and the Fuegian sheep stations, as well as remote Cape Horn, the southernmost point of the Americas, feared by sailors of every age. Here, among channels and icebergs, the last descendants of the southern peoples and their memory survive.
Magallanes also projects Chilean sovereignty over an enormous sector of Antarctica, the Chilean Antarctic Territory, from which the country maintains permanent scientific bases and from which expeditions set out for the white continent. From the Strait of Magellan to Cape Horn and Antarctica, this region is, literally, the end of the southern world and one of the last great frontiers on the planet.
The Maule River has marked a historic frontier since ancient times: it was the southern limit of the Inca empire's expansion over the Mapuche peoples of the central valley — the Picunche — who halted its advance southwards, as the Spanish chroniclers recorded. The region preserves in its name and its geography that condition of a land of limits and of encounters between the Andean and the Mapuche worlds.
The Picunche of the Maule were settled farmers who grew maize, potatoes and beans in the valleys watered by the Maule, Loncomilla and Mataquito rivers, and lived in villages under the rule of their lonkos. With the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the Maule was incorporated into the Captaincy General of Chile as one of its most important farming areas, organised into districts and large estates.
During the colonial period the Maule was a land of wheat estates, cattle ranches and towns that slowly appeared across the valley. Its deeply rural, agricultural character, forged in those centuries, remains one of the most marked features of Maule identity today.
The city of Talca, the regional capital, was founded as Villa San Agustín de Talca in 1742 by Governor José Antonio Manso de Velasco, on the site of an earlier settlement, and grew as the farming and commercial centre of the central valley. It played a prominent part in Chilean independence: it was here, on 12 February 1818, that Bernardo O'Higgins signed the Act of the Declaration of Independence, giving the city a place of honour in national memory.
The district was also the scene of hard fighting in the war of emancipation. On the night of 19 March 1818, the disaster of Cancha Rayada took place nearby, when Mariano Osorio's royalist army surprised the United Army of the Andes and came close to undoing the patriot cause, shortly before the decisive victory at Maipú. Talca also endured siege and royalist occupation during the Reconquest.
That historical weight, together with its nineteenth-century agricultural prosperity, gave rise to the proud local saying 'Talca, Paris and London'. The city preserves a valuable heritage, although much of its historic adobe centre was severely damaged by the 2010 earthquake, which struck the region with particular force.
The Maule Valley is the largest wine region in Chile, with around 45% of the country's planted area, and one of the oldest: the first vines were grown here in the sixteenth century, using the País grape (the Spanish Mission variety), brought by colonists to produce altar and table wine. Together with the neighbouring Curicó valley, it forms the great historic epicentre of the Chilean wine industry.
The Maule holds a unique treasure: old dry-farmed País and carignan vines tended by smallholder peasant growers, some of them more than a century old, which in recent decades have been revalued by a new generation of winemakers looking for wines of identity and tradition. Alongside them stand modern estates growing cabernet, carmenère and other noble varieties.
That double character — cradle of the popular country wine and at the same time a region of high-end bottles — makes the Maule a fascinating wine territory, where the history of Chilean wine can be read in the vine rows. Harvest festivals and an active wine route complete the region's appeal for wine lovers.
Towards the Pacific, the region opens onto a coast of cliffs, beaches and fishing coves. At the mouth of the Maule River stands Constitución, an old timber port and shipyard town that in the nineteenth century was an important centre of shipbuilding and wheat export. Its famous Piedras de la Iglesia and other rock formations carved by the sea are among the most singular coastal landscapes in Chile.
Constitución was hit extremely hard by the earthquake and tsunami of 27 February 2010, which destroyed its waterfront and caused many deaths, above all on Orrego island during a summer holiday night. The city was later rebuilt under a plan that sought to protect it from the sea with a mitigation park along the shore.
The great rivers of the Maule — the Maule itself, the Loncomilla, the Achibueno — and their valleys structure a region where farming, forestry and artisanal fishing are combined. Resorts such as Pelluhue and Curanipe, and coastal wetlands rich in birdlife, complete the seaward face of this river country.
Towards the Andes, the region offers landscapes of rivers, lagoons, native forest and hot springs, such as those at Panimávida and Quinamávida, traditional medicinal spas that have drawn visitors since the nineteenth century. The Altos de Lircay national reserve, the surroundings of the Achibueno River and the spectacular Laguna del Maule — a vast volcanic field high in the mountains — offer hiking, mountaineering and Andean nature of great beauty.
Laguna del Maule, at more than 2,000 metres beside the border with Argentina, is one of the largest active volcanic systems in the Andes, a landscape of cones, lava flows and intensely blue water. The forests of oak, coigüe and ruil on the foothills shelter a native flora protected in reserves and nature sanctuaries.
Between the coast, the wine valley and the high mountains, the Maule region unfolds the whole diversity of central Chile within a few kilometres. Its combination of country tradition, wine, rivers and mountains makes it a territory deeply representative of the rural soul of the country.
The valley of the Mapocho River, at the foot of the Andes, was inhabited by the Picunche, the northern branch of the Mapuche people, and had been reached by the expansion of the Inca empire, which left roads, irrigation canals and outposts in the area. There, on 12 February 1541, Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago del Nuevo Extremo beside the hill of Huelén, which he renamed Santa Lucía, laying out the classic Spanish grid around a Plaza de Armas.
In September 1541 the Picunche chief Michimalonco attacked and razed the infant city; Santiago survived thanks to the stubborn defence organised by Inés de Suárez, Valdivia's companion, in one of the founding episodes of Chilean memory. Painfully rebuilt, the city established itself as the head of the kingdom of Chile, although for much of the colonial period it was a modest centre, periodically battered by earthquakes and by the flooding of the Mapocho.
Hemmed in between the Santa Lucía and San Cristóbal hills and the Andes that frame it to the east, Santiago grew slowly as the capital of a poor, agricultural Captaincy General. Its real take-off would come only with the Republic, when it became the political, cultural and economic centre of the nation.
After independence, Santiago was confirmed as capital of the republic and became the stage for its great events. It was around the Plaza de Armas and the Cathedral that the First National Government Junta was formed on 18 September 1810; and it was in the La Moneda palace — a masterpiece by the Italian architect Joaquín Toesca built at the end of the eighteenth century and the seat of government since the middle of the nineteenth — that President Salvador Allende died during the bombardment of the coup on 11 September 1973.
Through the nineteenth century the city acquired its fundamental institutions: the University of Chile (1842), the National Library, the Municipal Theatre, and major public works driven by governors such as Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, who in the 1870s remodelled Santa Lucía hill and planned the camino de cintura ring road. The city of colonial palaces and convents was beginning to turn into a modern, French-influenced capital.
Santiago was also the great stage of national political life: its streets saw civic and military parades, revolutions, the 'social question', the workers' and student marches of the twentieth century, and in October 2019 the estallido social that filled Plaza Baquedano — popularly renamed 'Plaza Dignidad' — with protesters. Few cities concentrate the entire history of their country in quite this way.
The Mapocho River, which had repeatedly flooded the colonial city, was tamed at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1888 the old flood defences and the emblematic colonial Calicanto bridge were demolished, and the river was canalised between solid stone walls, one of the great feats of urban engineering of the age. Santiago then had around 250,000 inhabitants.
During the twentieth century the capital grew at dizzying speed: by the middle of the century the city was expanding at rates above 3% a year, spreading over the old estates of the valley and multiplying its surface area. Garden-city districts such as Providencia and Ñuñoa appeared, the Andean foothills to the east were settled and enormous working-class neighbourhoods grew to the south and west. In 1975 the Santiago Metro opened, the backbone of transport in the metropolis, and its expansion was set back by the earthquake of March 1985, which struck the centre of the country.
Today Greater Santiago holds around seven million people — close to 40% of Chile's population — and is the economic, financial and cultural engine of the country. It is a metropolis of contrasts, with the modern skyscraper district nicknamed 'Sanhattan' alongside poor neighbourhoods and the hills that enclose it, always under the gaze of the snow-covered Andes.
Beyond the big city, the Metropolitan Region preserves corners of strong rural tradition. To the west, the village of Pomaire keeps alive the old craft of greda pottery: its artisans hand-shape pots, jugs, lucky clay pigs and figurines, heirs to a technique with roots in the indigenous and colonial worlds. The village is also famous for its giant empanadas and its country cooking, and draws visitors from the capital every weekend.
In the rural surroundings of the region, estates, chapels and vineyards survive as reminders of the farming world of the central valley. The Maipo area to the south is one of Chile's great wine valleys, the cradle of celebrated reds — above all cabernet sauvignon — that rank among the most respected in the country.
This coexistence of metropolis and countryside, of skyscrapers and Pomaire clay, of Maipo wine and asphalt, is part of the identity of a region that gathers, within a few kilometres, almost everything Chile is.
The Metropolitan Region offers surprising contrasts within a short distance of the city. To the southeast runs the Cajón del Maipo, a deep Andean canyon of rivers, reservoirs, hot springs and mountains that is the great natural playground of Santiago's residents, with destinations such as El Morado natural monument, the San Francisco glacier and the El Yeso reservoir, whose turquoise water supplies the capital.
High in the Andes, less than two hours from central Santiago, lie the ski resorts of the Tres Valles — Valle Nevado, La Parva and El Colorado-Farellones — among the most important winter stations in South America, with runs above 3,000 metres and spectacular views over the mountains. Here the southern season draws skiers from all over the world between June and September.
So in a single day, from the Metropolitan Region, you can go from the bustle of a great Latin American capital to high-mountain snow or to the silence of an Andean canyon. That closeness between city and extreme nature is one of the great privileges of living at the foot of the Andes.
Tarapacá belonged to Peru until the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), when it was occupied and annexed by Chile along with the rest of the nitrate coast, and ceded in perpetuity under the Treaty of Ancón (1883). The region owes its character to that frontier history and to the wealth of the nitrate mined in its desert. Off its coast, on 21 May 1879, the famous naval battle of Iquique was fought, in which Captain Arturo Prat died and became Chile's greatest national hero.
Iquique, the regional capital, was transformed from a modest Peruvian fishing cove into one of the most important and wealthiest ports on the South Pacific, thanks to the shipping of nitrate to European markets. The city filled with Chilean, British and other merchants from around the world, and its prosperity is written into a historic centre of great value.
Long before nitrate, the Tarapacá desert was crossed by Andean cultures that left one of the most remarkable bodies of rock art in the Americas: the geoglyphs, enormous figures drawn on the hillsides. The most famous is the Giant of Tarapacá on Cerro Unita, the largest anthropomorphic figure in the world at more than 80 metres tall, thought to represent a deity or a powerful shaman.
In total the region contains more than four hundred figures — human, camelid and geometric — which marked the ancient routes of the llama caravans between the coast, the oases and the altiplano. Together with villages such as Pica and La Tirana, home to one of the largest religious festivals in Chile, and the oases of the interior, this heritage reveals a desert that was never empty.
The nitrate boom filled the Tarapacá desert with oficinas, the industrial company towns where thousands of Chilean, Peruvian and Bolivian workers laboured in brutal conditions. That world left a unique heritage: the nitrate works of Humberstone and Santa Laura, today ghost towns declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 and which, after years of restoration, were removed from the list of heritage in danger in 2019.
Those same conditions produced one of the most tragic pages in the history of Chilean labour: the massacre at the Santa María school in Iquique in December 1907, when the army opened fire on thousands of striking nitrate workers who had taken shelter in the school, leaving hundreds or thousands dead. The episode was burned into the national memory and into the celebrated 'Cantata Santa María de Iquique' by the group Quilapayún.
After nitrate went into decline from the First World War onwards, Iquique reinvented itself. The creation of the Zofri free-trade zone in 1975 turned it into a major commercial hub for northern Chile and the neighbouring countries, while its Cavancha and Brava beaches, alongside the enormous Cerro Dragón dune that rises within the city itself, made it a holiday destination and one of the paragliding capitals of South America.
The city preserves a handsome historic centre from the nitrate era, with Baquedano street, the Municipal Theatre and elegant mansions built of Oregon pine shipped in by sea, a testimony to the opulence of that age. Beach, desert, sport, commerce and nitrate history now coexist in the capital of Tarapacá, which looks out on the Pacific with the coastal range at its back.
Valparaíso emerged in the sixteenth century as the natural port of Santiago, on a bay open at the foot of an amphitheatre of hills. Its great boom came in the nineteenth century, when it became an obligatory stop for ships rounding Cape Horn between the Atlantic and the Pacific. British, German, Italian and other merchants from around the world settled on its hills and turned it into the most important port on the South Pacific and a pioneering financial centre.
It was here that Chile's first stock exchange, its first fire brigade and the oldest continuously published Spanish-language newspaper in Latin America ('El Mercurio de Valparaíso', 1827) were founded, along with an intense cosmopolitan cultural life. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 stripped the city of its prominence by diverting maritime traffic, and a major earthquake in 1906 had already hit it hard, but Valparaíso kept its bohemian soul and its unique identity.
Valparaíso's unusual geography, spread across 42 hills and a narrow flat strip beside the sea, produced a labyrinthine urban form of stairways, passages and coloured houses stacked one above another. To overcome the steep slopes, the famous ascensores or funiculars were built from 1883 onwards — the first was the Ascensor Concepción — of which there were once around thirty and several of which still run.
That ensemble of industrial and domestic architecture, an exceptional testimony to the first phase of nineteenth-century globalisation, earned the historic quarter of Valparaíso its inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. Today its hills — Concepción, Alegre, Bellavista — are an open-air museum of murals, viewpoints, bars and heritage houses that draw travellers from all over the world.
Next to Valparaíso grew Viña del Mar, the 'Garden City', an elegant resort conceived at the end of the nineteenth century as the great summer centre of central Chile, with its palaces, its casino, its gardens and its flower clock. Today it is the tourism capital of the region and the home of the International Song Festival of Viña del Mar, the largest event of its kind in the Spanish-speaking world.
The region is a land of poets: Pablo Neruda, Nobel laureate in 1971, had two of his best-loved houses here, La Sebastiana on a hill in Valparaíso and the one at Isla Negra, facing the sea, where his remains now lie alongside those of Matilde Urrutia. That stretch of coast, with resorts such as Algarrobo, El Quisco, El Tabo and Cartagena, is known as the Litoral de los Poetas, the coast of the poets.
Between Santiago and the coast lies the Casablanca Valley, a relatively young but highly regarded wine region with a cool climate shaped by Pacific fog and winds. Those conditions have made it the cradle of Chile's best white wines — sauvignon blanc and chardonnay — and of fine pinot noir, with a well-established wine route.
Together with the neighbouring San Antonio valley, Casablanca offers wineries open to visitors a short distance from both the capital and the coast, folding wine into the tourist circuit of central Chile.
The region administers two extraordinary island territories far out in the Pacific. The Juan Fernández archipelago, whose largest island is now called Robinson Crusoe, inspired Daniel Defoe's famous novel through the real story of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who lived there alone for more than four years at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Its endemic flora and fauna make it a unique natural sanctuary, declared a biosphere reserve.
Further out still, some 3,500 kilometres from the mainland, is Rapa Nui (Easter Island), one of the most remote inhabited places on the planet. Settled by Polynesian navigators, it developed the culture of the moai — colossal stone statues — and of rongorongo, and went through a dramatic ecological and social collapse before its annexation by Chile in 1888. Rapa Nui National Park has been a World Heritage Site since 1995 and is one of the country's great cultural icons.
The territory of Ñuble carries remarkable historical weight. Chillán, its capital, was founded in 1580 and refounded several times over the centuries, both because of the earthquakes that destroyed it and because of its role as a military outpost on the frontier with Mapuche Araucanía. During the colonial period and much of the republican era it was a key point in the south of central Chile, a stronghold and the head of a rich farming territory.
In Chillán Viejo, on 20 August 1778, Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme was born, the Liberator of Chile and its first Supreme Director, son of Governor Ambrosio O'Higgins. The city honours him with a great monument and a historical and cultural centre. Chillán is also the birthplace of two towering figures of Chilean art: the pianist Claudio Arrau, one of the greatest of the twentieth century, and — in nearby San Carlos and San Fabián — the singer-songwriter and folklorist Violeta Parra, who wrote 'Gracias a la vida'.
This territory, a meeting ground between the farming valley and the mountains, between the criollo and the Mapuche worlds, forged an identity with deep popular and rural roots, expressed in its music, its crafts and its traditions, and it has given Chile some of its best-loved creators.
On 24 January 1939 a violent, powerful earthquake centred on the Chillán area flattened the city and much of the region. It is estimated to have left between 24,000 and 30,000 dead, making it the deadliest seismic catastrophe in Chilean history. Chillán was virtually destroyed, with thousands of adobe houses collapsing on their occupants in the middle of the night.
The tragedy drove a profound transformation. Nationally, it prompted the creation of CORFO, the state development corporation that would go on to direct the country's industrialisation. Chillán was rebuilt to modern, earthquake-resistant standards, and became an unexpected focus of artistic creation: as a gesture of solidarity, the Mexican government donated the Escuela México, whose walls were covered with spectacular murals by the master David Alfaro Siqueiros and by Xavier Guerrero, today a national monument.
That cultural rebirth, together with the presence of artists such as Violeta Parra and Claudio Arrau, gave the rebuilt city a vibrant creative life. Chillán Cathedral, with its bold earthquake-resistant architecture of parabolic arches, and its great market, famous for its traditional cooking and its longaniza sausage, are symbols of a city risen from the rubble.
Ñuble was for a long time a province of the Biobío Region, sharing its administrative capital with distant Concepción. A citizens' movement sustained over years demanded autonomy for the area, arguing that it had its own identity and had historically been neglected. That effort bore fruit: in August 2017 the law creating the new region was signed, and it came into being in September 2018 as the sixteenth and most recent region of Chile, with its capital at Chillán.
The creation of Ñuble was celebrated as a triumph of regionalism and decentralisation in a historically very centralised country. The new region brought together the provinces of Diguillín, Itata and Punilla, uniting a territory that runs from the coast of the Itata valley up to the high Andes.
Its economy rests on the farming of the fertile central valley — cereals, sugar beet, fruit, vines — and on a growing tourism and services sector. The young region is now working to assert its identity and to draw on its rich historical, cultural and natural heritage to drive its development.
Towards the coast and the dry inland hills stretches the Itata valley, one of the oldest wine areas in Chile, where vines were already planted in the sixteenth century. For centuries its farmers grew País and muscat varieties without irrigation, producing traditional wines and spirits that supplied the south of the country. In its day it was one of the main colonial vineyards of Chile.
After decades of neglect, the Itata has enjoyed a notable revival: a new generation of winemakers has revalued its old dry-farmed vines, some more than a century old, and its heritage varieties, producing highly regarded wines of real character. The valley today combines small traditional growers with modern projects that look to the world market.
Alongside the vineyards, Ñuble preserves a rich rural world: the clay pottery of Quinchamalí, a village famous throughout the country, textiles, and a country cuisine of sausages, cheeses and fruit. That agricultural and artisan heritage, inherited from centuries of life in the valley, is one of the region's great cultural treasures.
Towards the mountains, Ñuble offers one of the great mountain complexes of south-central Chile: the Termas de Chillán and the Nevados de Chillán ski resort, at the foot of the volcano of the same name — whose highest point exceeds 3,200 metres — combining ski runs, natural hot springs and forests of oak, coigüe and araucaria. It is one of the most popular winter and adventure destinations in southern Chile.
The Nevados de Chillán volcano, active and from time to time smoking, crowns a mountain landscape of great beauty, partly protected within the Ñuble national reserve, a refuge for the endangered huemul, the native deer that appears on Chile's coat of arms. Trails, waterfalls and high valleys make this area a paradise for hiking in summer.
Those mountain landscapes, together with the farming valleys, the vineyards of the Itata and the rich historical heritage of Chillán, make Ñuble a region of surprising diversity, which in only a few years of its own existence has established itself as an increasingly attractive tourist and cultural destination in the heart of Chile.