Earthquake Central

Another day, another Chilean city. I had high hopes of Valdivia, Chile’s coastal university town, well-known for it’s breweries and forts. It was Chile’s high season, the 11th February, and whilst there were quite a few people in Puerto Montt where we had come from, there were many more still in Valdivia. Tourism is a mainstay here, and it was quite nice to be in a place which offered tourist services, easily and accessibly.

We got in in the early afternoon with the sun blazing, and the temperature soaring. We first made our home in a little Chinese restaurant (the first we had seen in many months), and then went to the main plaza where we met up with our couchsurfing host, René who was with an English couchsurfer called Nico. We all headed back to René’s mum’s place, where he was staying whilst waiting to start a new life in Canada (our last couchsurfers were hoping to go there one day, too!).

The next day, we had a mass of laundry to do, and luckily the weather remained nice the whole week, so by the time we got to look around on the town on the 13th, it was still lovely and sunny. We grabbed a colectivo into town, and saw a much livelier city than the sleepy Southern cities. There was more concrete, less wooden buildings, and it might have been the good weather, but the people looked a lot better for it!

The city is the capital of the Los Rios (the rivers) district, also called region XIV, known for it’s forests, volcanoes and the indigenous Mapuche communities scattered all around. Another distinction accorded to Valdivia is that of the epicenter of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. Measuring a whopping 9.5 on the moment magnitude scale (MMS), the 1960 earthquake destroyed 40% of all the buildings in Valdivia, which back then were not designed to withstand tremors. Most houses were made of wood, and were also uninhabitable, even though they did not seem to collapse as much as the heavier concrete ones. Over 20,000 people were made homeless in Valdivia alone, but the earthquake had other far-reaching affects. A tsunami, 25 meters high in Chile was generated, and killed people thousands of miles away, much as the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami did, in Hawaii and Japan. Eventually, the body count was around 6000 people, with the US being drafted in to set up a field hospital. Authorities in Chile actually had no map of Valdivia at the time, and the US military, organizing a grid search for survivors, inadvertently created the first map of the city.

Landslides, and soil subsidence, caused mountainside forests to be swept away, and lakes to be deepened. Valdivia was built at the confluence of three rivers, and it was the earthquake that flooded them, permanently, creating wetlands that are now protected nesting areas for numerous bird species.

Valdivia had seen disaster struck several times before this though, in the form of floods, fires and other earthquakes, and so they eventually rebuilt it. The Spanish colonial past and the later waves of German immigration have both made their mark though. Southern Chile has so many German-style buildings and cafes and beers it is a little like Paraguay.

The first place we explored was the downtown waterfront area, where they have a bridge across to an island which holds the university and some tourist attractions, a sea lion colony, and an attractive seafood and crafts market where boats for the outlying forts travel from. There is a museum sector on Isla Teja and we first decided to go to the Museo de la Exploracion Rudolph Amandus Philippi.

This museum (like all the museums in Valdivia) was completely in Spanish and so gave us a real good chance to practice and see how much we had learned. They had some good examples of fossils, including one of Chile’s national flower, the Chilean bellflower.

One room was dedicated to the museum’s namesake, Philippi, who was a German-born Chilean naturalist. He came to Chile in one of the big immigration drives to populate the South and Patagonia so the government of Chile could lay claim to it. He was a very successful naturalist and was also commissioned by Chile to explore the Atacama desert in the North.

The impact of the colonists can be seen in many things – not just the architecture and food of the region. Indigenous peoples mixed with Spanish peoples, and the German immigrants added to the infusion with their genes and culture. Many of the German schools became open to all Chileans and pushed forward the education system at the time. Philippi aided with this, as he became a professor of the natural history museum of Santiago.

The museum had a small taxidermy display, with a monito de monte (a small marsupial that lives in bamboo solely in the region) and a sting ray with a silly grin on it’s face. A book that showed all of the endangered animals in the region also made a good read.

The second museum was the Museo Histórico y Antropológico Mauricio Van de Maele, named after a Belgian anthropologist and archaeologist who was also an immigrant to the area, and led some of the restoration work on the Spanish colonial architecture in the area. It had lots of objects made from cow leather, including spoons, bowls and even musical instruments.

The main part of the museum though was it’s collection of Mapuche artifacts. The information board is completely in Spanish again, some of it very difficult to understand (Chilean Spanish is quite different from normal or even other Latin American Spanish). Mapuche weavings and jewelry are the most famous things they produce, and there were some fine examples on display. Mapuche cloth is woven on a loom, and the patterns on the material along with the other accoutrements signify the social standing and position of the wearer.

Clay pottery was also on display, which the Mapuche roll out on a huge slab with a lump of stone that looks like a rolling pin and bread. This had it’s stylistic origins in a group of people called the Vergel people, or the Orchard. Nothing else is known about them other than their usage of huge ceramic painted or monochrome funerary urns. The Mapuche’s designs followed theirs closely, although it is not really known what relationship the two groups had – Mapuche styles also matched other cultures, including the Incans themselves. However, it is the silverware that the Mapuche are famed for, and the stories of their jewelry no doubt added to the legends of cities of gold and silver in South America that prompted much of the Spanish exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The bottom floor of the museum was dedicated to the colonialists of the region. Each room was named for an important figure in Valdivian history. Carl Anwandter was a pharmacist who lived on Isla Teja who created a brewery which became the largest in the continent. Various possessions from the time were on display in the room named after him.

In one of the last rooms (Lord Cochrane Hall’s room) we visited, there were objects belonging to Lord Hall, a Scottish military man who led the Chilean Naval assault on Valdivia when it was still Spanish, capturing it in 1820.

We headed off to the waterfront again after seeing the museums, where we saw the city’s sea lion colony lounging about on a floating pontoon in the river. We walked down towards the university’s Botanical Gardens and took a walk through the little trails they have made next to the river. Valdivian rainforest is a temperate forest with mixed broadleaf vegetation that exists all the way down to the island of Chiloe on Chile’s coast. We had seen much of it before, and it was nice to see it next to a river. These rivers waters were raised by the earthquakes in the region, and are quite wide, forming excellent breeding grounds for birds and other animals. We saw a cormorant which jumped underneath the water as we approached and swam away. A tourist boat passed us too, forming a very small tsunami (10 centimeters) – ok, so it was only a small swell, but it made us jump back so we did not get wet!

We then walked back in the heat over the bridge to the fish market on the Valdivia side of the river. We saw plenty of fish, but it was late afternoon and most of the good stuff had gone. Cormorants, sea lions and turkey vultures were all being well fed by the scraps though. A Chilean drink called chica de manzana was being bottled up. basically, it is fermented cider – but we did not try it yet.

A submarine is docked a little further up the riverfront, but you have to buy tickets on the day, and it is extremely popular and over-priced, so we did not bother going on it, as the vendor told us queues were so big we would have to arrive an hour before the ticket office opened! Jokers.

We made our way a few more blocks up the road past an old Spanish tower, built to help defend the city from native Huilliche attacks. We found another Chinese restaurant to satiate our hunger for some known and good foods (Chilean food is bland and stodgy). Having eaten, we checked out a church and the cultural center, which was essentially various rooms decked out with colonial and German-immigration era furniture and decorations. There was also a portrait of what can only be described as Gene Hackman, but I cannot find out who it really was, as the spotty school kid who was left in charge had no idea, and there were no information boards, anywhere.

We found the municipal market, which we have now learned is the best and cheapest place to buy food from in Chile. We resolved to come back the next day to try the mussels in garlic and chili dip, and we headed back for some rest.

Valentine’s Day was the next day, and we had booked a boat trip to the Spanish fortifications which dot the landscape and overlook the rivers further out towards the Pacific Ocean. We boarded our boat in the afternoon (about 2pm), and were pleasantly surprised to see that the two seats next to us on the 140+ person boat were the only ones which were empty, so we had lots of room to enjoy the voyage! I gave Francesca a chocolate rose for Valentine’s Day that I had secretly bought, and the stewards on the boat bought us our drinks – pisco sours!

We journeyed around the island we had been on, past lots of reed beds and the Botanical Gardens we had visited the previous day. The boat trip was very pleasant, even though the guide was jabbering away in Spanish constantly, we eventually drowned him out. The included lunch was soon rolled out – a salmon dish for Francesca, and a curanto (sausage, potato, mussels, clams, chicken and pork) for me. For dessert we got a lovely Neapolitan ice cream.

After a few pleasant hours on the tour boat, we arrived at our first destination – Corral. Valdivia had been constructed as a logging town by the Spanish in 1552 and the indigenous people were incensed by the destruction and plunder of their land. Mapuche and Huilliche attacks peaked in 1599 and the city was destroyed and left to rot as a ghost town until the 17th Century. But between 1645 and 1670 the town was rebuilt, repopulated and fortified with a defensive fortification that included 18 forts, and we were to visit two of them.

Corral is small community that is the site of the San Sebastián de la Cruz Fort, which was the main headquarters of the fort system – one of the biggest in the Americas. Overlooking Corral Bay it protected Valdivia from the South and sea. We disembarked for an hour and watched an awesome re-enactment by local actors in the fort which recreated the Chilean capture of the fort system. This is the battle that Lord Cochrane Hall led for Chile against the Spanish, when they captured Valdivia from them in 1820. It was pretty good, watching them fire the cannons and beat each other up – one even escaped and was caught and had his throat slashed!

Back on board and we headed back up the Rio Valdivia where we made our way to Mancera Island. This was home to the San Pedro de Alcantara fort, which also protected Valdivia waters, and was a little better preserved. The forts are all bastions, built with brick, lime and sandstone, and at San Pedro, we could see ruins of some of the buildings, like the church and governor’s house. There was also a little underground bunker to explore that used to house the fort’s arsenal.

There was also a little church we explored, and we took a look over the bay before it was time again to move on. A few hidden costs, like the fort entrance fees, and the fact that the boat does not wait for stragglers did not spoil a good day out! On the boat again and we saw they had laid out more food! A fish sandwich, and a German cake, called kuchen with tea! Awesome. By the time we got back to Valdivia we were so stuffed the food we had planned on getting was totally unnecessary, and so we headed back to the ranch.

That evening we said our goodbyes to our host, and the very next day we set off for our next city – Valdivia sure was not what we had anticipated, but neither has Chile been so far! A long way behind what we expected, with it’s wooden houses, bad plumbing, terrible roads and even worse food; the South of Chile has few good things going for it – but Valdivia is one of those things - a nice diversion, and we recommend it for a summer visit. Off to Pucon next!