1941 magazine article about the Lake Area of Central CHILE, color photos

Description

Selling is a 1941 magazine article about:
Chile
Title: Chile's Land of Fire and Water
Author: W. Robert Moore
Subtitled "Smoking Volcanoes and Ice-hooded Peaks Stand Sentinel Over Limpid Lakes in the Far Southern Andes ”
Quoting the first page “You’re late. You'll be lucky to get even a few days of good weather," friends said when I left Santiago to go south to the Lake District of Chile. The sun was shining.
"You're late: the summer season has ended," I heard at almost every place I visited. "The rains will start any day now."
Still the sun shone. Day after day sunshine glistened on the snow-capped mountain peaks and shattered itself into rainbows in the spray of roaring waterfalls.
The "unseasonable" weather of March was very pleasant indeed.
Sunshine in the Chilean lake region deserves emphasis, fair weather is so rare. Only in the summer months of January and February are sunny days a fair certainty. Throughout much of the remaining ten months of the year clouds and rain linger over the landscape.
In this locality Darwin, on his voyage of the Beagle, found that "every inch of land, every tree, every thicket was a sponge saturated with water."
Moss grows on rooftops and walls, on trees, turf, rocks, and rail fences. "Even we acquire a bit of moss ourselves!" commented one of the local residents. "The rain and dull weather get into our systems."
Among those with whom I talked, however, there were quick wit and ready smiles. Somberness, if there is any, apparently vanishes with the appearance of sunshine.
The length of Chile, compressed between the lofty Andes and the Pacific coast, is out of all proportion to its width. Though averaging only about a hundred miles wide, it stretches north and south for some 2,600 miles.
Contrasts are marked. The country embraces parched, sunburned deserts filled with copper and nitrates in the north, possesses fertile agricultural lands in its central valley, has vast virgin forests extending toward the south, and finally terminates in the bleak, windy, soggy islands at Cape Horn.
Nearly two-thirds of the way southward, where farming areas give way to timberiands, is the Lake District. Here the rugged Andean backbone becomes a little less bulky and more disjointed.
"Chilean Switzerland," some have called these lake lands that lie between the towns of Temuco and Puerto Montt. To the Alpine Republic there is a similarity-and a difference.
Much German is spoken, for colonists from Germany began migrating to these parts in the middle of the last century. But Spanish is the principal tongue. Here forests are barriers to grazing and plowing. They are being felled and fired, rather than encouraged to grow. Pioneering still is in progress.
Here, too, are mountain peaks perpetually covered with glaciers and snow, but, unlike the Alps, some of them smoke from volcanic fires that smolder deep in their bosoms.
In a little more than 200 airline miles there are a dozen large lakes and several small ones. Eight white-hooded volcanoes stand sentinel within this same compass. It is a land of much scenic charm.
To thousands of Chileans and Argentineans this is vacation land. And as for trout fishing, those who have whipped its rivers will proclaim there is no better spot in the world.
From Santiago to Temuco we sped by express train through ripening vineyards and harvested fields. Passing at nighttime through the region of Chillan and Concepcion, scene of the severe earthquake of January, 1939, we saw only peaceful autumn countryside. Farmers prodded oxen at plows or yoked to lumbering two-wheeled carts full of grain.
Temuco is a small country town grown large in catering to expanding needs of Cautin Province, of which it is the capital. Trade in wheat, barley, oats, timber, and apples furnishes revenue for its 38,000 inhabitants.
Only 60 years ago the town was a fort in the forest, surrounded by hostile Araucanian Indians.
For centuries this warlike tribe had dominated the region. Even the Spanish Conquistadores had their troubles with these fierce Indians. In 1541 Don Pedro de Valdivia, one of Pizarro's captains, founded Santiago and, in the next 13 years, pushed south to establish forts at Concepcion, Villarrica, Imperial (now Carahue), Valdivia, and other points.
Valdivia had great aspirations for Imperial. It was to be the "city that should be head of …"
7” x 10”, 20 pages, 9 B&W and 10 color photos plus map
These are pages from an actual 1941 magazine.
41G4
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