Las Iglesias de Chiloé (The Churches of Chiloé)

We have been spending a lot of our time exploring the historic churches of Chiloé, many of them built by the Jesuit missionaries of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. We have traveled to many of the small towns and villages on the Isla Grande and on the smaller islands to the east, to see the countryside and the settlements, and especially to see their churches. The churches are all absolutely beautiful and all made of wood, and many of the older ones are made completely of wood. Some are still painted in their traditional bright colors. Most of the churches are in poor or very bad condition, and some are almost falling down. Fortunately, however, there is a strong conservation effort underway, and a few of the churches we have seen are newly restored, and a few more were in the process of restoration when we saw them. Here are some of the highlights from the last couple of weeks.

Castro

The cathedral in Castro, the capital of the archipelago, is covered in brightly-painted corrugated iron on the outside and beautiful wood on the inside. The paint job is currently this yellow and violet color scheme, but it used to be bright salmon-pink and purple. We have been to a couple of Masses here, and the inside is really amazing. The interior of the Castro cathedral is built in replica of a Gothic, stone vaulted church, but completely in wood instead of stone.

Achao
The church in Achao is the oldest on Chiloé, built in 1730 completely without metal. All the nails are wood and the frame is fitted together by interlocking beams. Achao is on a small island called Quinchao, to the east of the Isla Grande. We got to it by taking a bus, which went on a ferry to the island.

The inside is painted beautiful bright blues, golds and whites, and all the decorations and accents are, of course, entirely in wood. Some of the oldest Christian religious figures are in this church, so flash photography was not allowed.

They love Mary in Chiloé! She is all over the place and frequently is more prominently displayed than Jesus in the churches. She has many names in Spanish and is invoked all the time during mass. She definitely has a mother-goddess position here. During one mass we were at they sang a song asking Mary to take the words and thoughts of the people to Jesus, so she is a messenger to God as well.

Quinchao

We travelled from Achao, by bus to the tiny village of Quinchao at the southern tip of Isla Quinchao. The roads were very steep and muddy because it was raining and the landscape was absolutely breathtaking. The Quinchao church is under restoration, so we were only able to see it from behind a large construction fence. There were only a few houses and one restaurant and the church in Quinchao, it is right on the beach, though. We met some men who had been free-diving up to ten meters for mussels in the sea.The yellow color is some type of lichen or moss that has gown on the church.The graveyards in Chiloé are beautiful and brightly colored, like the houses and churches. Many graves have small shrines with pictures of the dead person and candles and figures of Mary and Jesus. The Chilote people are not shy about the liberal use of both real and fake flowers, both in the graveyards and in the churches. I think this looks really cheerful and pretty, but Ryan says he prefers the austere New England slate stones and spare cemeteries.

It was raining while we were in Quinchao and we had a couple hours to wait until the village bus returned to pick us up. Our German travel-friend who was with us that day accompanied us to the only restaurant in Quinchao, run by this woman. Her two grandsons (one pictured here) were very interested in the foreigners, especially in football (soccer). They wanted to know how to say many things in English and German and talked with us the whole time we were drinking our Nescafé. Their grandmother, who ran the restaurant, is a descendent of German immigrants to Chile. Both her mother and grandmother were from Hamburg.

San Agustín

When we went to the island of Lemuy with Berta (the young woman from our hostel), her parents took us around Lemuy to see some of the churches and villages. San Agustín was where we stopped to fill up the pick up truck with gasoline, which is extremely expensive here. Ten liters cost us about 13 US dollars.
Liucura

This brightly painted church is right on the sea side in Lemuy.Puqueldón

Puqueldón is where Berta is from on Lemuy. This is only of the few two-towered churches on the islands.Detif

In Detif, also on Lemuy, we were very lucky to be let inside the church. Berta´s father asked the caretaker of the church to open it for us. The inside was beautifully painted and decorated. We were even able to walk up into the bell tower and see the amazing all-wood construction.Vilupulli

Vilupulli, which we mistook for another village nearby called Villupulle, had a beautifully, fully restored church. We took the municipal bus to the dirt road leading to Vilupulli (after some confusion with the bus driver over Vilupulli and Villupulle), and walked three kilometers or so down almost to the sea shore to see this wonderful church with the skinny steeple.
Chonchi

From Vilupulli we walked along the beach to the larger town of Chonchi to check out this yellow and blue church. The outside is iron panelling, like the cathedral in Castro. We were able to enter the church and inside you could see how they were restoring the columns by taking the weight off of them with large trunks of trees. Rilán

One day we took the bus to the small village of Rilán, out on the tip of a peninsula of the main island of Chiloé. The village was very charming and the church of course was pretty. Notice the palm trees in front of it. The climate here is much like Scottland, where, I hear, they also have palm trees in ornamental gardens.
We were able to buy a re-used beer bottle full of chicha (hard apple cider) from a local merchant (in the white building just to the right of the yellow house in the picture below). This is a picture of Ryan enjoying the chicha in front of the Rilán church. The village of Rilán. Ryan particularly liked this place. He says he wants to live here (although he says that about many of the places we have gone together).
We climbed up the hill behind the village of Rilán, past the very apple trees that produced the chicha, to a pretty outdoor shrine. This statue of the crucifiction was up there, complete with two hawk-like birds. Auspicious. There was also a much larger, more colorful, and more decorated statue of Mary up there.
This is the view of Rilán from the look-out shrine.

Nercón

Nercón is just ten minutes away from Castro to the south, so we went there a couple of times to see this church and try to get into it. On the first visit we met a couple who were cleaning the graves of their grandparents. They told us that the woman who had the key to the church (the caretaker) was at the hospital that day and we should come back and knock on her door to enter the church another day. This church was also made without metal nails. Everything was constructed only using wood and a few large stones for the foundation.

Ryan on the front porch of the Nercón church.The second day that we went to Nercón we were able to enter the church and, luck would have it, they were about to have a mass, on Saturday afternoon. The priests that visit the rural churches can only make it to some once or twice a month, so the mass schedules are difficult to figure out. This is the alter at the Nercón church. Notice the central position of Mary, she is dressed in a pink, fluffy dress, surrounded by bright fake flowers. One of the women from the village was climbing up on the alter right before I took this picture to light the candles for mass. There were only about twelve people at the mass, including the two of us and the priest. One of the main themes of the service, after lent, was ´why are so few people from Nercón coming to church?´ It was a really beautiful day out though, and the priest thought that might have had something to do with it. They all seemed happy enough to share their mass with a couple of strange foreigners. The woman who was in charge of getting someone to read a section of the bible was really pressuring me to read. She kept saying that there was no one there that wanted to read and the same people had to keep doing it week after week. I came up with a number of excuses, foremost embarrassment and the fact that I am not in fact Catholic, which I´m sure just made us seem stranger to them. This is one of the alters in the Nercón church. It seemed very crazy to me, with the devil lurking under the angel with a chain around his neck. I can´t tell if the angel is about to kill the devil or what, but he´s also holding a scale of justice. Again notice the liberal use of fake flowers. These are the two nice people we met who were working to clean the grave of the man´s grandparents. They talked with us for a long time about their lives in Nercón.

Dalcahue

Dalcahue is north of Castro. When we were there, we also were able to try some chicha from the apples of Dalcahue. The following picture was painted on the back wall of the Dalcahue church. It shows Jesus surrounded by the mythological figures specific to Chiloé. In the lower left hand corner is Pencoya, the beautiful sea goddess that rules over the bounty or scarcity of the fish and shellfish in the ocean. In the lower right is the phantom ship made of pure gold that sails through the foggy nights between the islands of Chiloé. In the upper left is the evil troll, called Trauco, who bewitches young, beautiful virgins and chops down trees with only three whacks of his little hatchet. In the upper right is the mythic bull of Chiloé. Ryan and I were both very taken with the outright mixture of pagan myth with Christianity. The sea-mother-sex-goddess right there next to Jesus with his heart shining with love and God. Wow.
Inside there was a little museum in the back with these very old vestments hanging on the walls, and historic, two-hundred-year-old documents mouldering on shelves in the cold and damp.