Читать книгу Torres del Paine. Chile's Premier National Park and Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park онлайн

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Immigration to Chile from Europe increased from the mid-19th century, both in the capital and further south, with several thousand Germans settling in the Chilean Lake District (the area north of Puerto Montt), and a steady stream of Italian, Croatian, English and other settlers arriving in Patagonia – a process nicely encapsulated in the atmospheric cemetery in Punta Arenas, with its broad, cypress-lined avenues and its gravestones of pioneers and immigrants. Like the earlier process of colonization, this later immigration resulted in the almost complete loss of southern Chile’s indigenous population – the Tehuelche and, further south around the coast, the Kaweshkar – who were, quite simply, subsumed beneath the tide of settlers and missionaries. Meanwhile silver and, in particular, copper mining increased in the north, and wheat exports soared, feeding a growing economy and increased international trade.

A lucrative nitrate industry, centred around Antofagusta – at that time part of Bolivia (but now in the north of Chile) – was the cause of Chile’s involvement in the War of the Pacific in 1879. Following Bolivia’s decision to raise export taxes on nitrate (contrary to an agreement to which an earlier border settlement had been subject), Chile invaded Bolivia, with Peru (which controlled the nitrate-rich area around Iquique and Arica) joining on Bolivia’s side soon after. Chile’s victory over Bolivia in August 1879, and the capitulation of Lima early in 1881, gave the country a vast area of new territory in the north (the border moved some 900km further north, at both Bolivia’s and Peru’s expense) and complete control over the enormous nitrate deposits of the Atacama desert. It also cut off Bolivia’s access to the Pacific.