Island Culture

Heading South from Santiago, the first big island that breaks off the continent is Chiloe, the starting gun for thousands of fjords and islands crumbling down the west coast toward Tierra del Fuego and Chilean Antarctica.


Chiloe is known for its distinct, mysterious Chilote culture. Fishing is big. The ornately shingled houses built on stilts are also an attraction. And wooden cathedrals.

But witches, too, are said to play their part.

For a rainy couple of hours we hiked up a section of the island's northeastern coast from Tenaún to Quecaví. The beach ran below a towering cliff draped in lush vegetation, occasional waterfalls sprinkled down onto jagged sandstone embankments, and prehistorically-sized Nalca plants gently hid numerous deep, black, recessed caves, the legendary abodes of witches -- magical humans who gain the power of flight through donning the skin of little children.

The Chiloe landscape is washed with intermittent rain which regularly cede to brilliant, sparkling sunshine illuminating hillsides across the water blinking holographic shades of emerald.

But there is something even more strange and exotic than green hills and rain. These flowers, for instance, smelled just like pink Bazooka Joe bubblegum, a scent powerful enough to evoke childhood memories.


And just inland from the sea, the perfectly pastoral farmland would be disrupted by the caw of low-flying pelican.


Our destination, Quecaví, is famed to have the largest witch school on the island, located in an unknown, but nearby cave. We had better luck finding the bar. It was mostly an empty, wood paneled room consisting of a card table and us.

The young, morose woman tending the "bar" talked despondently, but dramatically. Witches weren't an entirely easy conversation, she didn't believe in them. Her grandparents had told her stories, when witches walked among the villagers, undetected. But it's looking unlikely that she will be telling her children about witches.

She told us that tourism to Quecaví took a dive this year due to abnormally high levels of summer rain. She also told us about international fishing companies that exploit locals like her, paying $20 a day for 14 hours on the water, whether sunny or stormy. No more fairy tales, just the same old story about global exploitation.



But dammit had a hard time finding any admitted witch believers. It was all nursery rhyme by the time we showed up. Just when we were least expecting it, at the very last day in Chiloe, we hitched a ride with the ReadyMix cement truck driver. He'd never really believed, but when he was 10 he looked out his window he saw two points of light in the hills on the horizon. Each point of light made an arc and traded places with the other. Those, he was told by his grandfather, were witches flying. They do that.

Back to the bar in Quecaví where I got lost on my way to the restroom and stumbled into another local industry:


And Quecaví also had a horse:


And a graveyard:


And a Church, said to be one of the most important as it was built counterpoint to black magic: