Arauco War

Almagro, on reaching the Mapocho Valley in 1536, sends Gómez de Alvarado with an expedition of two hundred Spaniards, one hundred cavalry and one hundred foot, with a large group of Indian auxiliaries to the south of Chile with the mission of exploring the country to the Strait of Magellan.

The group advances without encountering much resistance from the Promaucaes.

The Spaniards under Gómez de Alvarado, after crossing the Itata River, are intercepted by a numerous contingent of Mapuches, perhaps as many as twenty-four thousand, armed with many bows and pikes.

The Mapuches launch a number of assaults that are successfully repulsed by the Spanish.

Frustrated by these reverses and by disorientation caused by the horses, iron weapons, and armor of the conquistadors (all of which are unknown to the Mapuches), the natives retreat, leaving many dead and more than one hundred prisoners.

The Spanish lose only two men but others are wounded.

Discouraged by the ferocity of the Mapuches, and the apparent lack of gold and silver in these lands, Gómez de Alvarado decides to return and inform Almagro what has happened.

This battle has a strong influence on Almagro's entire expedition, and motivates, in part, its full retreat the following year to Peru.

Almagro's own reconnaissance of the land and the bad news of Gómez de Alvarado's encounter with the fierce Mapuche, along with the bitter cold winter that settles ferociously upon them, only serves to confirm that everything has failed.

He never finds gold or the cities that Incan scouts had told him lay ahead, only communities of the indigenous population who live from subsistence agriculture.

Local tribes put up fierce resistance to the Spanish forces.

The exploration of the territories of Nueva Toledo, which will last two years, is marked by a complete failure for Almagro.

Despite this, at first he thinks staying and founding a city will serve well for his honor.

The initial optimism that had led Almagro to bring his son he had with the indigenous Panamanian Ana Martínez to Chile had faded.

Some historians have suggested that, but for the urging of his senior explorers, Almagro would probably have stayed permanently in Chile.

He is urged to return to Peru and this time take definitive possession of Cuzco, so as to consolidate an inheritance for his son.

Dismayed with his experience in the south, Almagro makes plans of return to Peru.

He never officially founds a city in the territory of what is now Chile.

Some accounts say that when Almagro found out about Felipillo's betrayal and his subsequent confession about purposely misinterpreting Pizarro's message to Atahualpa, he ordered his soldiers to capture Felipillo and tear his body apart with horses in front of the region's Curaca.

Nowadays, among Peruvians, the word "Felipillo" has taken a meaning similar to "traitor."

The withdrawal of the Spanish from the valleys of Chile is violent: Almagro authorizes his soldiers to ransack the natives' properties, leaving their soil desolate.

In addition, the Spanish soldiers take natives captive to serve as slaves.

The locals are captured, tied together, and forced to carry the heavy loads belonging to the conquistadors.

Most Chileans work in agriculture because precious metals are scarce.

Large landowners become the local elite, often maintaining a second residence in the capital city.

Traditionally, most historians have considered these great estates (called haciendas or fundos) inefficient and exploitive, but some scholars have claimed that they were more productive and less cruel than is conventionally depicted.

The haciendas initially depend for their existence on the land and labor of the indigenous people.

As in the rest of Spanish America, crown officials reward many conquerors according to the encomienda system, by which a group of native Americans is commended or consigned temporarily to their care.

The grantees, called encomenderos, are supposed to Christianize their wards in return for small tribute payments and service, but they usually take advantage of their charges as laborers and servants.

Many encomenderos also appropriate native lands.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the encomenderos fend off attempts by the crown and the church to interfere with their exploitation of the indigenous people.

Chile—cut off to the north by desert, to the south by the Araucanians, to the east by the Andes Mountains, and to the west by the ocean—becomes one of the most centralized, homogeneous colonies in Spanish America.

Serving as a sort of frontier garrison, the colony finds itself with the mission of forestalling encroachment by Araucanians and by Spain's European enemies, especially the English and the Dutch.

In addition to the Araucanians, buccaneers and English adventurers menace the colony, as is shown by Sir Francis Drake's 1578 raid on Valparaiso, the principal port.

Because Chile hosts one of the largest standing armies in the Americas, it is one of the most militarized of the Spanish possessions, as well as a drain on the treasury of Peru.

Throughout the colonial period, the Spaniards engage in frontier combat with the Araucanians, who control the territory south of the Rio Bio-Bio (about five hundred kilometers south of Santiago) and wage guerrilla warfare against the invaders.

During many of those years, the entire southern region is impenetrable by Europeans.

In the skirmishes, the Spaniards take many of their defeated foes as slaves.

Missionary expeditions to Christianize the Araucanians prove risky and often fruitless.

Most European relations with the native Americans are hostile, resembling those later existing with nomadic tribes in the United States.

The Spaniards generally treat the Mapuche as an enemy nation to be subjugated and even exterminated, in contrast to the way the Incas treated the Mapuche, as a pool of subservient laborers.

Nevertheless, the Spaniards do have some positive interaction with the Mapuche.

Along with warfare, there also occurs some miscegenation, intermarriage, and acculturation between the colonists and the indigenous people.

The Chilean government plays a significant role in the colonial economy.

It regulates and allocates labor, distributes land, grants monopolies, sets prices, licenses industries, concedes mining rights, creates public enterprises, authorizes guilds, channels exports, collects taxes, and provides subsidies.

Outside the capital city, however, colonists often ignore or circumvent royal laws.

In the countryside and on the frontier, local landowners and military officers frequently establish and enforce their own rules.

The economy expands under Spanish rule, but some criollos complain about royal taxes and limitations on trade and production.

Although the crown requires that most Chilean commerce be with Peru, smugglers manage to sustain some illegal trade with other American colonies and with Spain itself.

Chile exports to Lima small amounts of gold, silver, copper, wheat, tallow, hides, flour, wine, clothing, tools, ships, and furniture.

Merchants, manufacturers, and artisans become increasingly important to the Chilean economy.

Mining is significant, although the volume of gold and silver extracted in Chile is far less than the output of Peru or Mexico.

The conquerors appropriate mines and washings from the native people and coerce them into extracting the precious metal for the new owners.

The crown claims one-fifth of all the gold produced, but the miners frequently cheat the treasury.

By the seventeenth century, depleted supplies and the conflict with the Araucanians reduce the quantity of gold mined in Chile.

Concepción, a significant military settlement for the Captaincy-General of Chile, had been overrun and destroyed by Mapuche armies in 1554, and once again after being refounded in 1555.

Restored during the governorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza when he landed there and built a fort on the Alto de Pinto in 1557, the town had been refounded once more on January 6, 1558, by captain Jerónimo de Villegas.

It will become the headquarters of the military forces engaged against the Mapuche in Araucanía over the next two centuries, growing to a population of ten thousand despite a siege in 1564 and other attacks by the Mapuche.

The home of the Real Audiencia from 1565 to 1575, Concepción is destroyed by an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.3. at 9 AM on February 8, 1570.

No lives are lost, but every house is destroyed.

Because of a delay between the earthquake and the accompanying tsunami, the population is able to escape to higher ground.

Aftershocks are felt for months.