Maya’s Notebook

Travel Guide

Travel BookTrail style to Chiloé Island

Chiloé Island, the main island in the archipelago of the same name, is in southern Chile. It’s known for its iconic wooden churches built by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th and 18th centuries, such as the Church of Chonchi. Not to mention the stunning scenery and wildlife!

“I’m in Chile, my grandmother Nidia Vidal’s country, where the ocean takes bites off the land and the continent of South America strings out into islands. To be more specific, I’m in Chiloé, part of the Lakes region, between the forty-first and forth-third parallel south, an archipelago of more or less nine thousand square kilometers and two hundred thousand or so inhabitants, all of them shorter than me. In Mapudungun, the language of the region’s indigenous people, Chiloé  means ‘ land of cahules’ , which are these screechy, black-headed seagulls, but it should be called land of wood and potatoes.”

“Aside from the Isla Grande, where the most populous cities are, there are lots of little island,some of them uninhabited. Some of the islands are in groups of three or four and so close to each other than at low tide, you can walk from one to the next.”