Valdivia: Selling the Environment, Creating Ecotourism during the Cold War

• In Event: Landscape construction in the modern history of Chile and Latin America. Approaches from animal domestication, technology, and infrastructure.

Abstract

On May 22nd 1960, Chile experienced one of the strongest earthquakes in human history. The earthquake and ensuing tsunami had wide ranging social and political ramifications that culminated with the transformation of southern Chile. As its leaders tried to address many of the social ills that the earthquake exacerbated: lack of housing, economy, and the marginalization of many rural people, they also tried to exploit the region’s natural beauty. During the 1960s leaders continually met to create a tourist economy surrounding its natural environment. The region most affected, Valdivia and its surrounding community, tried to exploit the beauty of its natural environment as it tittered between creating an extractive economy, cultivation of lumber, while still being sustainable and maintain its beauty for the creation of a tourist economy. My paper explores the struggles and debate in transforming the natural environment into ecotourism, both in rumbles of the earthquake, the cold war, and social political transformation. This is the first chapter of my next project that will explore the development of ecotourism in Southern Chile from the 1960s, through Salvador Allende’s administration and Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Author

• Jimmy Del Río, Universidad de Oklahoma