Valdivia
Valdivia is a city and commune in southern Chile, administered by the Municipality of Valdivia. The city is named after its founder, Pedro de Valdivia, and is located at the confluence of the Calle-Calle, Valdivia, and Cau-Cau Rivers, approximately east of the coastal towns of Corral and Niebla. Since October 2007, Valdivia has been the capital of Los Ríos Region and is also the capital of Valdivia Province. The national census of 2025 recorded the commune of Valdivia as having 110,980 inhabitants, of whom 150,048 were living in the city. The main economic activities of Valdivia include tourism, wood pulp manufacturing, forestry, metallurgy, and beer production. The city is also the home of the Austral University of Chile, founded in 1954, the Centro de Estudios Científicos and one of Chile's three environmental courts.
The city of Valdivia and the Chiloé Archipelago were once the two southernmost outliers of the Spanish Empire. From 1645 to 1740, the city depended directly on the Viceroyalty of Peru, which financed the building of the Valdivian fort system that turned Valdivia into one of the most fortified cities of the New World. In the mid-19th century, Valdivia was the port of entry for German immigrants who settled in the city and surrounding areas.
In 1960, Valdivia was severely damaged by the Great Chilean earthquake, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, at magnitude 9.5. The earthquake caused c. 2 m of subsidence around Valdivia leaving large areas of former pastures and cultivated fields permanently flooded. Today there are various protected wetlands within the urbanised area of Valdivia as well as in its outskirts.
History
Pre-Hispanic times (12,000 BC – 1543)
The area around Valdivia may have been populated since 12,000 – 11,800 BC, according to archaeological discoveries in Monte Verde, which would place it about a thousand years before the Clovis culture in North America. This challenges the "Clovis First" model of migration to the New World. Researchers speculate that the first inhabitants of Valdivia and Chile travelled to America by watercraft and not across a land-bridge in the Bering Strait.During at least the Middle Archaic, southern Chile was populated by indigenous groups who shared a common lithic culture called the Chan-Chan Complex, named for the archaeological site of Chan-Chan located some 35 km north of Valdivia along the coast.
Ainil
By the time of the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, Valdivia was inhabited by the Huilliche. The Huilliche and Mapuche were both referred to by the Spaniards as Araucanos. Their main language was a variant of Mapudungun, the Mapuche language.A large village called Ainil stood where present-day downtown Valdivia has been developed. The Huilliche called the river, Ainilebu. Ainil seemed to have been an important trade center; it was a port on the sea and had access to the interior via the network of the Cruces and Calle-Calle rivers, both tributaries of the Valdivia. Ainil may be described as "a kind of little Venice," as it had large areas of wetlands and canals. Since that period, most of these waterways and wetlands have been drained or filled. The market in Ainil received shellfish and fish from the coast, legumes from Punucapa, and other foods from San José de la Mariquina, an agricultural zone northeast of Valdivia. A remnant of this ancient trade is the modern Feria Fluvial on the banks of Valdivia River. The surroundings of Valdivia were described as extensive plains having a large population that cultivated potatoes, maize, quinoa and legumes, among other crops. The population has been estimated by some historians as 30 to 40 thousand inhabitants as of 1548, based on descriptions made by the conquistadors. Pedro Mariño de Lobera, an early conquistador and chronicler, wrote that there were half a million Indians living within ten leagues from the city. Other historians consider these numbers too high and argue that early Spaniards usually exaggerated in their descriptions.
Later the British naturalist Charles Darwin observed that "there is not much cleared land near Valdivia." This suggests that pre-Hispanic agriculture in Valdivia was far more extensive than the agriculture practiced in the early 19th century at the time of his visit.
First Spanish city (1544–1604)
The first European to visit Valdivia River's estuary was the Genoese captain Juan Bautista Pastene, who took possession of it in 1544 in the name of the Spanish king, Charles V. He named the river after the Governor of Chile, Pedro de Valdivia.Pedro later travelled by land to the river described by Pastene, and founded the city of Valdivia in 1552 as Santa María la Blanca de Valdivia. It was the southernmost Spanish settlement in the Americas at the time of the founding. Following the establishment of the church of Santa María la Blanca in Valdivia, more buildings were constructed. Mariño de Lobera described it as "the second city in the Kingdom of Chile". Many of Chile's most influential conquistadors and future governors were granted land in Valdivia, such as Jerónimo de Alderete, Rodrigo de Quiroga, Francisco and Pedro de Villagra, apart from Pedro de Valdivia himself.
Jerónimo de Bibar, a chronicler who witnessed the founding wrote:
After Pedro de Valdivia's death, the war with the Mapuches, called the War of Arauco, continued. The Spanish made many attempts to defeat the Mapuche and defend the cities and forts built on their territory. On 17 March of 1575, the city was damaged by a massive earthquake. It has since been likened to the Great Chilean earthquake of 1960 in terms of damage.
Until 1575, the Huilliche of Valdivia did not organize any notable resistance against the Spanish. They had fought as Indios amigos with the Spanish against the northern Mapuche in the Arauco War. But that year 4,000 Indians who had been fighting in Martín Ruiz de Gamboa's army rebelled after returning to the area of Valdivia.
During the 16th century, the economy of Valdivia was sustained by trade in agricultural products from nearby areas and by the coining and export of placer gold from Villarrica, Madre de Dios and Osorno. In Lima and the rest of Chile, people referred to all the gold from these sources as "gold from Valdivia." Many merchants of Lima had envoys in Valdivia, and the city developed a large ship building industry. It produced the largest ships in the Kingdom of Chile.
After the demoralising Battle of Curalaba in 1598, in which the Mapuche killed governor Óñez de Loyola, the Mapuche and Huilliche made a mass rebellion. The Indians destroyed or forced the abandonment of all the Spanish settlements and forts in their lands, in what came to be known as the Destruction of the Seven Cities. On the morning of 24 November 1599, the Huilliche attacked the city and massacred its inhabitants, some few being rescued by the ships in the harbour. The border of the Spanish Empire shifted north of the Bío-Bío River. Valdivia was re-established but it was a Spanish enclave surrounded by native Huilliche territory. Together with Castro, Chile on the island of Chiloé, it was one of the southernmost colonies of the Empire.
Eleven days after the first destruction of Valdivia, a group of 270 Spanish soldiers arrived from Perú. The commander of the troops, colonel Francisco del Campo was convinced that the city of Valdivia needed to be repopulated. After Francisco del Campo's expedition left, the Dutch corsair Sebastian de Cordes occupied the site of Valdivia for some months, giving the Dutch government information about this abandoned part of the Spanish Empire. The Spaniards returned on 13 March 1602, when captain Francisco Hernández Ortiz established a fort on the ruins of the city. On 24 September natives attacked the fort unsuccessfully, but laid siege. The Spaniards could not acquire food or supplies, and on 3 February 1604 abandoned the fort, with the last starving survivors rescued by ship.
Ruins of Valdivia and Dutch occupation (1604–1645)
The Dutch governor of the East Indies Hendrik Brouwer, learned about the situation in Valdivia, decided to establish a base there for further attacks against the Viceroy of Peru. This plan was well accepted as the Netherlands was at war with Spain. The Dutch had previously taken the North of Brazil from the Spanish-Portuguese crown, and the idea of creating a South American empire was attractive. In spite of his advanced age, Hendrik Brouwer left his post as governor in the East Indies to personally lead the expedition. The Dutch fleet destroyed the Fort of Carelmapu and the city of Castro before arriving at Corral Bay at the mouth of the Valdivia River. Hendrik Brouwer died 7 August in Puerto Inglés while waiting for better winds to sail north to Valdivia. John Maurice of Nassau, while in charge of the Dutch part of Brazil, had equipped the expedition and had secretly appointed Elias Herckman as commander if Brouwer died. Herckman finally occupied the ruins of Valdivia in 1643, renaming it Brouwershaven. The Dutch did not find the gold mines they expected and the hostility of the natives forced them to leave on 28 October 1643.Second Spanish city (1645–1810)
, the Viceroy of Peru from 1639 to 1648, knew of the strategic importance of Valdivia and decided to repopulate and fortify it once and for all. He financed partly the expedition to repopulate Valdivia with his own capital. The contingent in charge of the mission was organized in Peru and consisted of seventeen ships filled with building materials and supplies that astounded contemporaries by its magnitude. The local government of Chile could not secure Valdivia as it was engaged in continuous war with the Mapuches and was deeply dependent on the Real Situado, an annual payment of silver from Potosí to finance the army of Chile. The Valdivia enclave was placed directly under the control of the Viceroyalty of Peru that administered Valdivia from its repopulation in 1645 until 1740. Corral, located on the river entrance to Valdivia, became one of the most fortified bay at the time, with 17 forts. During this time it was several times proposed to move the city of Valdivia to Mancera Island. Valdivia's original site, downtown of modern Valdivia was repopulated in 1684.Once Spanish presence in Valdivia was reestablished in 1645, authorities sent convicts from all-over the Viceroyalty of Peru to construct the Valdivian Fort System. The convicts, many of whom were Afro-Peruvians, became later soldier-settlers once they had served their sentence. Close contacts with indigenous Mapuche meant many soldiers were bilingual in Spanish and Mapudungun. A 1749 census in Valdivia shows that Afro-descendants represented at least 0.24% of the local population.
Beginning in the mid-18th century, Valdivia left behind its past as an enclave and a period of agricultural expansion begun. The expansion, that mainly directed to the south, was done mostly by pacific means, but hostilities with indigenous Huilliches did occur. After the Valdivian colonization had reached Bueno River, Spanish authorities pushed for connecting the city of Valdivia with the settlements at Chacao Channel by a road.