Chiloé, Chile

Hello from the Archipelago de Chiloé! We have been having a great time on the enchanted island of sea-gulls. It is very beautiful here, the towns are small and very quaint and the comforting smell of wood smoke fills the tiny neighborhoods of cute wooden houses. The entire east half of the archipelago is rolling hills and beautiful pastureland with lots of seacoast composed of little islands and channels. The countryside here is the ideal pastoral landscape with sheep and wildflowers and little dirt roads connecting small settlements, and I am loving it! We are staying in Castro, the capital of the island of Chiloé, in a nice hostel on a steep hill overlooking the port and a channel of the sea. The town has a beautiful cathedral that is all made of wood on the inside in an exact replica of Gothic stone-vaulted churches, and covered in corrugated iron on the outside and painted yellow and lavender.

The island of Chiloé retains a Nineteenth-Century feel and a lot of its unique traditional culture of folk crafts (wool and woodworking, mostly), mythology, fishing, and animal husbandry. There are artisan markets in all the sizable towns where they sell lots of wool sweaters and hats, and fish. We went to the history museum in Castro and saw all of the traditional wooden artifacts that they (used to) make here. There was such a lack of both metal and money in the islands that EVERYTHING is made out of wood, even today, and timber was used as a currency until the middle of the Twentieth Century! We saw a boat anchor made out of wood with a big rock tied into the middle, and even a door lock and key made completely of wood. The churches here, for which the islands are famous, were originally made with fitted beams and wooden nails without any iron at all.

We have already seen a number of the wonderful wooden churches. Sixteen of them have recently been declared UNESCO World Heritage sites. Today we took a bus and a ferry to the small island of Quinchao, where we traveled around and saw two beautiful churches. The first one we saw, in Achao, is the oldest in Chiloé, built in 1730 according to the sign there, and made without any nails. Inside it was painted blue and was very beautiful, and of course ornamented entirely in wood. Then we went to the tiny village of Quinchao where we saw another church that was also very beautiful, and used to be painted bright yellow on the outside, but is now sadly in disrepair. Fortunately, though, they are in the process of restoring the church, but unfortunately again, this meant that it was impossible to get close to it. In Quinchao, Naomi and our German traveling friend had a good Spanish conversation with some kids and their grandma in a tiny cafe, and we met a wet man who had just returned from diving for shellfish.

Tomorrow we have been invited by a woman who works in our hostel to visit her family home in the tiny town of Puqueldón on the island of Lemuy. She is very friendly and we will sleep in her backyard in a tent, meet her family, and see more churches and countryside. Naomi and I want to see most of the sixteen churches, although there are even more than that in the whole archipelago. To get to some we may have to hitch rides on fishing boats. I am so excited!

--Ryan

P.S. Photographs are coming . . .