Following Charles Darwin in Chile

Entering the port of Valparaiso by boat, I marvelled to see the same sight that Charles Darwin saw after rounding Cape Horn and its ferocious storms on the HMS Beagle. On the first day after his arrival at Valparaiso, in the middle of the Austral winter July 23, 1834, he wrote:
“When morning came, every thing appeared delightful. After Tierra del Fuego, the climate felt quite delicious—the atmosphere so dry, and the heavens so clear and blue, with the sun shining brightly, that all nature seemed sparkling with life. The view from the anchorage is very pretty. The town is built at the very foot of a a range of hills, about 1,600 feet high and rather steep…In a north-easterly direction there are some fine glimpses of the Andes.”
On the 150th anniversary of his publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 (24 November 2009), it is well to remember that he didn’t go just to the Galapagos. Some of his greatest insights into the mechanisms of evolution were in Chile and retracing his journey there makes for a fascinating vacation. Following Darwin through the exciting city of Santiago and the wine region of the Maipo Valley adds additional delights.
Darwin spent two and a half years in Chile (December 17, 1832 to June 29, 1835), fully half of his round-the-world voyage, and one whole year in just in the Valparaiso-Santiago area (July 23, 1834 to June 29, 1835). From the Beagle’s base in Valparaiso, he made numerous trips around central Chile and seems to have thoroughly enjoyed every minute—as do visitors today.
Darwin described Valparaiso as a “picturesque” town consisting of “one long, straggling street… parallel to the beach [with] low, whitewashed houses with tile roofs.” Today it has grown into a sprawling city and bustling seaport, but just across the bay, the village of Viña del Mar, long a resort favourite of Chileans, retains the small town charm that Darwin appreciated. On my last visit I found a quaint, clean hotel, conveniently a few steps from an empanada stand on the main street.
From nearby hills, Darwin got a better view of the Andes and the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas at 6962 metres (22,841 ft). We begin to realize that, besides becoming the world’s first and foremost evolutionary biologist, he had the soul of a poet:
"…the volcano of Aconcagua is particularly magnificent... the Cordillera [range of mountains] owe the greater part of their beauty to the atmosphere through which they are seen. When the sun was setting in the Pacific, it was admirable to watch how clearly their rugged outlines could be distinguished, yet how varied and how delicate were the shades of their colour.”
The “range of hills” Darwin saw beyond Valparaiso is topped by pyramidal form of La Campana, the “Bell of Quillota.” After so long at sea, Darwin couldn’t wait to stretch his legs and within days of his arrival he was riding to Quillota to climb La Campana.
Of all the areas he saw in Chile, he seemed to like the town of Quillota and its fertile valley the most:
“…The valley of Quillota…was exceedingly pleasant, just such as poets would call pastoral: green open lawns [actually, alfalfa fields], separated by small valleys with rivulets, and the cottages, we will suppose of the shepherds, scattered on the hill-sides… Any person who had seen only the country near Valparaiso, would never have imagined that there had been such picturesque spots in Chile… The little square gardens are crowded with orange and olive trees, and every sort of vegetable. On each side huge bare mountains rise, and this from the contrast renders the patchwork valley the more pleasing. Whoever called Valparaiso ‘the Valley of Paradise’ must have been thinking of Quillota.”
Quillota today is just as pretty. A city of 75,000, it retains its Spanish colonial character with continuous, low buildings surrounding the Church of St. Martin and the Convent of Santo Domingo. An archaeological museum contributes to the community’s culture by sponsoring poetry recitals. It nestles against La Campana National Park.
Following Darwin’s route, my companions and I took a trail to a high waterfall, “la cascada” on the maps. The photo of La Compana at the head of the blog was taken on this trail. Climbing up gradually through semi-desert, it passes a forest of giant palm trees, the endemic Chilean Wine Palm. It intrigued Darwin because “its stem is very large, and of a curious form, being thicker in the middle than at the base or top”—and because its sap can be made into wine, sugar, or a sweet, sticky desert that he called “treacle.” Its edible fruit and tastes like coconut. The world’s largest palm by weight and volume, its stem reaches 1.5 meters or more (five feet) wide and a height of 30 metres, with a crown up to nine meters across.
Darwin, camped near the peak of La Campana, noted that:
“The evening was fine, and the atmosphere so clear, that the masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although no less than 26 geographical miles distant, could be distinguished clearly, as little black streaks. A ship doubling the point under sail appeared as a bright white speck… The setting of the sun was glorious; the valleys being black, whilst the snow peaks of the Andes yet retained a ruby tint. When it was dark, we made a fire beneath a little arbour of bamboos, fried our charqui (or dried strips of beef), took our maté, and were quite comfortable. There is an inexpressible charm in thus living in the open air. The evening was calm and still; the shrill noise of the mountain bizcacha, and the faint cry of the goatsucker, were only occasionally to be heard.”
We saw and heard the Mountain Viscacha, too. In his Origin of Species, Darwin used the distributions of the various species of these rodents in the Chinchilla family as an example of natural selection for different habitats.
Darwin, a keen observer of local customs, compared the Huasos, Chilean horsemen, with the gauchos of Argentina. In cattle country around La Campaña, I’ve often encountered them, always in their traditional broad-brimmed straw hats, knee-length leather boots, and colourful scarves. In the village of Batuco, we had to pull the car into a driveway so they could drive the herd through town. In Omué, as picturesque a town as one can imagine at the base of La Campaña, at night we saw horses tied to a cantina’s hitching rack; in the morning we met the fathers riding to the school with one or two children astride, or driving the whole family into town in a one-horse buggy.
Leaving Quillota, Darwin made the first of several excursions into and ultimately across the Andes. In one(April 1835), he went southward to the capital, Santiago, up the now-famous wine region of the Maipo Valley, up the Maipo River to a hotsprings resort, across a high pass and down to Mendoza, Argentina, and back to Chile by a more northerly pass. Afterwards, he remarked, “My excursion only cost me twenty-four days, and never did I more deeply enjoy an equal space of time.” I felt the same after each of my trips. Both of these passes, where Darwin struggled on horseback leading laden mules, I drove on a good highways past ski resorts.
Before mooring at Valparaiso, Darwin had already worked out how repeated earthquakes had caused some areas to sink and others to rise, throwing marine sediments laden with sea shells far above sea level. He had already theorized that the islands of Tierra del Fuego had been formed by the sinking of a mountain range. Now, he considered his finding thick layers of marine sediments with shells of extinct species at elevations up to 4,270 metres (14,000 feet), and other geological evidence, as proof that the Andes were formed by a slow and gradual rise of land over uncounted eons. Moreover, his finding along the coast of masses of marine shells of currently living species, elevated in sediments 120–150 metres (400–500 feet) above sea level, proved that this part of the coast of South America is still rising.
Darwin recalled, looking back at La Campana early one morning from the Andes:
“These basins or plains, together with the transverse flat valleys (like that of Quillota) which connect them with the coast, I have little doubt, are the bottoms of ancient inlets and deep bays, such as at the present day intersect every part of Tierra del Fuego, and the west coast of Patagonia. Chile must formerly have resembled the latter country, in the configuration of its land and water. This resemblance was…seen with great force, when a level fog-bank covered, as with a mantle, all the lower parts of the country: the white vapour curling into the ravines, beautifully represented little coves and bays; and here and there a solitary hillock peeping up, showed that it had formerly stood there as an islet.”
I was fortunate to see almost the exact same view as I crossed a ridge above the low-lying clouds, the Bell of Quillota rising above as if an island in the sea. These ideas were central to his theory that natural selection enabled individuals with some slight variation that gave it an advantage in a new environment to persist and its progeny to procreate more than those lacking the variation; and that over many generations, repeated selection for that characteristic could, in the time scale of the formation of mountains, evolve into new species.
Travel Notes
Hotel Hispano Restaurant, Plaza Parroquia 391, Viña del Mar. Tel: (56) (32) 268-5860, Fax (56) (32) 247-7096; a single for one night was $45.00 CAD.
My favourite hotel when not on business was Hotel Presidente, at Eliodoro Yanez 867, in the Presidente district of Santiago. A single was $145 USD in 2006. Tel: +(56) (2) 235-8015, email: infohp@presidente.
Nearby is the excellent restaurant, El Otro Sitio (“The Other Place”) at Antonia Lopez de Bello 53, is consistently rated as one of the top Peruvian restaurants in Santiago. Tel: 777-3059
In Olmué, a delightful hotel with a fine restaurant is the Hosteria Aire Puro (“Hotel of Pure Air”), Av. Granizo 7672, Tel: (56) (33) 441381, email: infor@hosteriaairepuro.cl, www.hosteriaairepuro.cl. The price for a chalet for three for one night was $94.00 CAD.
A nice restaurant in Valparaiso was the Café Journal, Cochrane 81, Tel: (56) (32) 259 6760. Lunch for four was $45.00 CAD. It has a sister restaurant in Viña del Mar.