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Published: June 16th 2008
My Chiloe - churches and rain
Iglesia Nuestra Senora de Patrocinio, TenaunThe Chiloe archipelago is the northernmost part of the frayed edge of Chile, that tattered jumble of islands and fjords that starts south of Puerto Montt and continues for nearly 3,000km down to Cape Horn. The blending of local and Spanish traditions has resulted in an identity different from that of the mainland, with the rural feel and beach-free nature of the islands keeping tourist numbers down. With home for me being in a coastal area of the UK with inclement weather and a fishing industry, it was going to be interesting to see if any other parallels could be drawn.
Rain was to be something of a constant during my stay in the archipelago, and indeed it's viewed as part of the appeal of the region. I based myself in Castro, centrally located on the main island and home to twenty-odd thousand people. If I wasn't walking around in drizzle or something heavier, I was inside minibuses with windows grey with condensation. The sun had a strict curfew for all bar about 2 hours each afternoon, and even with those constraints it sometimes wasn't allowed out. The dampness of the atmosphere and the misty views under lowering clouds did
not encourage a positive outlook, and the mold I saw growing inside several of the buses was not a surprising outcome.
There were three main reasons why I had come to Chiloe - its mythology, its churches, and its potatoes. Regarding the last of these, I'd read somewhere that the most commonly cultivated potato in the world had originated in Chiloe, however subsequent Google searches revealed no further evidence of this, nor did I see any cafes using this fact for advertising, so I eventually concluded it was a false assertion. On a food-related theme, seafood was extremely popular, and a salmon dish that I ordered in Achao came with a sauce containing as much weight of seafood as the salmon itself.
The mythology also proved to be highly elusive. I'd been enthused by reading tales of virgin-seducing dwarves with superhuman strength, creatures with a leg twisted over their back that feasted on men's flesh, and dancing sea goddesses of such beauty that fish swam open-mouthed in amazement, but I saw and heard nothing of them on my wanderings, bar a few sculptures in the regional museum in Ancud, some similar statues in the nearby plaza, and a
couple of cafes named after these beings.
Fortunately the churches delivered in spades. Constructed in the mid-eighteenth century onwards, generally using wooden pegs rather than nails, they were built in a style that was a synthesis of that of the Jesuits who were attempting to convert the locals to Christianity, and that of the locals who had a long tradition of construction using the various hardy woods of the region. There are over 150 such churches throughout the archipelago, with 16 of them having been accorded UNESCO World Heritage status. Hiring a car would have been a much more productive way of taking in some of them, as public transport isn't really geared towards the demands of church-hunting tourists, e.g. I spent over 3.5 hours on buses in order to snatch 45 minutes of time at the church in Tenaun - it was an excellent-looking church, but the bus schedules precluded any other way of seeing it without spending the night in Tenaun. Since the place was one of the most depressed and depressing villages I've seen in a while, with derelict buildings having a stab at outnumbering occupied ones, overnighting would have been long on desolation. One of
El Trauco
Horny dwarf with superhuman strength. Irresistible to virgins.
Museo Regional, Ancud the other passengers on the trip back to Castro had brought his luggage on a sledge pulled by two cows.
I also saw the churches in Dalcahue (an unhelpful white colour against the grey of the sky), Achao (dark brown shingles and a green roof on the tower being given added atmosphere by the murder of crows wheeling against the sombre clouds), and Chonchi (bright blue and yellow paint job again not looking its best due to both the gloomy weather and the renovations taking place on the plaza immediately in front). Castro's church, with an interesting but slightly grotty yellow and purple outside and currently undergoing renovations, was the only one that I was actually able to enter, and the interior was an amazing demonstration of the art of construction in wood. The various figures of Christ had an eerie realism, and I wasn't sure if my goosebumps were from that or the chill temperature.
Castro had some further unique architecture in its stretches of palafitos, wooden houses extended over the water via stilts. The waterside view of these could best be appreciated at one inlet in particular, though if one looked closely then the sheer amount
of rubbish lying nearby became obvious, not to mention the ramshackle nature of the buildings themselves. I was reminded very much of Kampung Ayer in Brunei.
One noticeable problem in Chiloe was that of drunkenness, which existed even before I arrived. I saw a fully-clothed man standing neck-deep in the fjord off Castro, babbling incoherently (maybe that's a bit harsh, as almost any Spanish is incoherent to me, but there was definitely a high babble factor). A staggering, intoxicated chap near the bus station asked me something I couldn't understand, and my "No entiendo" resulted in him producing an admirable vocabulary of English swearwords. Around Castro, I saw a couple of centres for recovering alcoholics. Though there are no doubt other reasons (both economic and cultural) for this problem, I do see a pattern around the world of cold/wet weather leading to an over-reliance on booze.
That aside, the local people were amiably curious about my provenance (my appearance and laboured Spanish giving the game away that I wasn't Chilote). I saw only a handful of other tourists, though this time of year is hardly optimal from a weather point of view. In National Geographic's 2007 world rankings
of islands that combine visitor appeal with a minimal number of ecological issues (whether tourism-inflicted or not), Chiloe came joint third. Chilean Pablo Neruda, regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest poets and from whom this blog's title comes, opined in the 1960s that the archipelago represented the heart of the nation. With Chiloe containing maybe 1% of the country's population, it's a small, soggy, friendly heart, that's unlikely to be overcome by a stress-induced seizure any time soon.
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Rodrigo Aguilar
non-member comment
Good Report
Hello Very interesting report but you have a little mistake in the pictures. The Iglesia Santa Maria is from Achao and not from Ancud. Best regards