Chile historical timeline

Origins

The Mapuche and their neighbours held the land south of the Biobío river long before any European saw it, and the Inca empire, expanding down the continent, got no further than the Maule and stopped. Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago in 1541 and was killed by Mapuche forces twelve years later. The war that followed — the Arauco War — ran in some form for three centuries, and for much of the colonial period the southern third of Chile was simply not under Spanish control.

Turning points

Independence was declared in 1810 and secured at Maipú in 1818. The War of the Pacific of 1879 to 1883 then redrew the map: Chile took the nitrate-rich Atacama from Peru and Bolivia, gaining the wealth that built the republic and leaving Bolivia landlocked to this day. Nitrate paid for everything until synthetic fertiliser destroyed the market in the 1920s, after which copper took over and has never let go. In 1970 Salvador Allende became the first Marxist elected head of state in Latin America; in September 1973 a military coup ended that and began seventeen years under Augusto Pinochet, during which more than three thousand people were killed or disappeared. A referendum in 1988 voted him out, and democracy returned in 1990.

Influential people

Lautaro, the Mapuche leader who learned Spanish cavalry tactics as a captive and used them against his captors. Bernardo O’Higgins, who led the independence struggle. Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945, and Pablo Neruda, who won it in 1971 — a country of fewer than twenty million people has two poetry laureates. Violeta Parra collected and remade the folk repertoire and shaped the Nueva Canción movement that followed her.

Cultural evolution

Chile filled its middle and south with immigrants — Germans around the southern lakes, Croatians in Magallanes, Palestinians in Santiago, who now form the largest such community outside the Middle East. Rural huaso culture supplies the national imagery, poetry occupies a place in public life it holds almost nowhere else, and the Catholic Church, dominant for four centuries, has lost ground quickly in the last thirty years.

Present-day significance

Chile supplies roughly a quarter of the world’s copper and a large share of its lithium, which ties a long, thin country to the global energy transition. The mass protests of October 2019 opened a constitutional process that produced two draft constitutions, both rejected at referendum, in 2022 and 2023. The dictatorship is still being worked through in public: the Museo de la Memoria in Santiago and the former detention centre at Villa Grimaldi are open, and they are visited.