Visiting Chiloé Island: Chile’s Island of Witches

Visiting Chiloé Island: Chile's Island of Witches

Published: June 27th, 2024. Updated July 27th, 2026.

In 1880, Chilean prosecutors put roughly eighty people on trial for running a secret parallel government that had judged, punished, and allegedly killed across the island of Chiloé for the better part of a century. The organisation was called La Recta Provincia, the Righteous Province. Its leaders described themselves not as criminals but as magistrates, and the case against them is one of the only witch trials in history for which sworn courtroom testimony survives. This is not the strangest thing about Chiloé. It is simply the clearest illustration of what three centuries of isolation can produce when a community is left almost entirely to its own devices.

Chiloé is a large island off the coast of southern Chile, separated from the mainland by the Chacao Channel, a stretch of water barely three kilometres wide at its narrowest point. That short distance has done an enormous amount of historical work. What is Chiloé, in practical terms, is a place that spent centuries close enough to the rest of Chile to be nominally governed by it, and far enough away to develop its own churches, its own food system, its own criminal justice, and its own supernatural bureaucracy almost entirely on its own terms.


A Colony Too Remote to Notice Independence

Spanish forces took Chiloé from its Chono and Huilliche inhabitants in 1567 and held it for the better part of three centuries. When the rest of Chile fought its way to independence between 1810 and 1818, the news barely registered on the island. Chiloé remained a royalist stronghold, garrisoned and loyal to the Spanish crown, for eight more years. Two Chilean campaigns to take it failed, in 1820 and 1824. It finally fell in January 1826, after the Battle of Bellavista, making it the last piece of Spanish territory on the South American mainland to change hands. The Spanish forts at Ancud, San Antonio and Agüi still stand, low earthworks facing a channel that no longer needs defending.

This delay was not a matter of stubbornness so much as geography. Mainland Mapuche resistance to Spanish colonisation cut Chiloé off from land routes north for generations, so the island’s contact with the wider Spanish empire ran almost entirely by sea, and irregularly at that. A place that receives its news, its priests, and its garrison reinforcements at the mercy of the weather does not experience history in the same rhythm as everywhere else. Chiloé’s royalist loyalty in 1826 was less a political stance than a symptom of how little the outside world had managed to reach it.


A Cathedral System Built Without Nails

The clearest physical expression of that isolation is also Chiloé’s best-known attraction: its wooden churches. Jesuit missionaries arrived in the seventeenth century and developed what became known as the Circular Mission, travelling on foot and by boat between scattered communities and building chapels as they went. Because there was no local stone worth quarrying and no realistic way to import it, the churches were built entirely from native timber, using the same carpentry techniques Chilote shipwrights used to build boats. Cypress and alerce shingles stand in for the marble and stucco of a European cathedral. Some of the surviving churches were assembled without a single metal nail, held together instead with wooden rivets, a method chosen partly for durability in a wet climate and partly because iron nails were simply hard to come by.

When the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish America in 1767, Franciscan missionaries inherited the archipelago and largely preserved the style rather than replacing it, which is part of why Chiloé’s churches, despite spanning the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, still read as a single coherent tradition. UNESCO listed sixteen of them as a World Heritage Site in 2000, chosen from more than 150 wooden churches and chapels that remain across the archipelago. Santa María de Loreto in Achao, built around 1730, is the oldest still standing.

Visiting them today means understanding that they were never purely religious buildings. Built on high ground and often visible from the water, they doubled as navigation markers for a population that moved by boat more than by road. A community that could not gather easily for a market day or a council meeting could still, in principle, see its church from a passing boat. The churches functioned as the fixed points in a landscape that offered almost none.


The Trial That Cross-Examined a Mythology

If the churches represent the sanctioned answer to isolation, La Recta Provincia represents the unsanctioned one, and it is the stranger story of the two. Chilote oral tradition holds that the archipelago’s waters and forests are populated by supernatural figures largely unknown outside the region: the Trauco, a forest-dwelling creature blamed for unexplained pregnancies; the Pincoya, a sea spirit whose dance determines whether a season’s fishing will be abundant or lean; and El Caleuche, a ghost ship crewed by drowned sailors, said to sail the inland channels lit up and full of music before vanishing into fog. Historians generally trace these figures to a blending of Huilliche and Chono belief with the Catholicism the missionaries brought, a mythology assembled, like the churches, from whatever materials were locally available.

What sets Chiloé apart is that this mythology did not stay confined to stories told by the fire. By the nineteenth century, a secret organisation calling itself La Recta Provincia or La Mayoría had established what its own members described as a parallel judicial system, dividing the archipelago into districts, hearing disputes, and, according to testimony given at trial, enforcing its rulings through poisoning and ritual violence. In 1880, the governor of Chiloé brought roughly eighty of its members before a real Chilean court on charges of illegal association, poisoning, and murder. Two leaders were sentenced to fifteen years for manslaughter, ten more were convicted of belonging to an unlawful society, and the elderly Mateo Coñuecar, identified as one of its senior figures, received three years. The organisation was formally banned.

Historians today read the case less as a supernatural episode than as a collision between two systems of authority. La Recta Provincia had, in effect, been administering rough justice in communities the Chilean state had never really reached, and the 1880 trial was as much the young republic asserting jurisdiction over a place it had only nominally controlled for half a century as it was a prosecution of witchcraft. Whatever the truth of the individual poisoning charges, the case is unusual for how directly it forces a visitor to take Chilote folklore seriously as social history rather than colourful legend. Few mythologies anywhere have had their central institution cross-examined under oath.


The Island That Fed the World Without Anyone Noticing

Chiloé’s isolation produced one more legacy that most visitors encounter at the dinner table before they encounter it in a history book. Genetic studies indicate that the majority of potato varieties grown worldwide today descend from stock indigenous to Chiloé rather than, as long assumed, exclusively from the Andean highlands further north. Islanders traditionally cultivated somewhere between 800 and 1,000 distinct potato varieties, a number reduced by modern agriculture but still represented by close to 300 native cultivars grown on the archipelago today, recognised by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization as a globally significant agricultural heritage system.

The dish that best demonstrates this is curanto, a method of cooking meat, shellfish and potatoes together over heated stones in an earth oven, sealed under nalca leaves and left to steam for hours. Archaeologists have found cooking pits on Chiloé that predate any of this by thousands of years, evidence of an earth-oven tradition stretching back to the earliest human presence on the island, long before potatoes, pork or chicken were added to the pit. A traveller who eats curanto in Chiloé today, layered with milcao and chapalele, two more potato preparations, is eating a version of the same technique used on this coastline for over ten thousand years, adapted generation after generation to whatever ingredients isolation and the tides made available.


Life at the Edge of the Water

None of this history is confined to museums. Castro, Chiloé’s capital and Chile’s third-oldest continuously inhabited city, still has neighbourhoods of palafitos, timber houses built on stilts directly over the water to cope with tides that can rise and fall by several metres in the Chacao Channel. Fishing boats tie up at the base of houses whose front doors face the street and whose back rooms hang over open water at high tide. Further north, the Puñihuil islets are one of the only places on earth where Humboldt and Magellanic penguins nest side by side on the same rocky outcrops, reachable by small boat from a fishing cove rather than any formal harbour, a detail that says something about how much of Chiloé is still organised around informal, small-scale access rather than infrastructure built for large numbers of visitors.

That is changing. A suspension bridge across the Chacao Channel, under construction since the early 2020s, is scheduled to open around 2028. When it does, the crossing that currently takes thirty to forty minutes by ferry, weather permitting, will take about three. It will be the longest bridge in Chile and will finally connect Route 5, the highway that already runs the length of the country, all the way from the Peruvian border to Quellón at Chiloé’s southern tip. For the first time in its recorded history, Chiloé will not require a boat to reach it.

It is worth visiting Chiloé with that fact in mind. Almost everything distinctive about the island, its churches built from what was locally at hand, its supernatural legal system, its curanto, its palafitos angled toward the water rather than the road, exists because the sea kept Chiloé at arm’s length from the rest of Chile for longer than almost anywhere else in South America. The bridge will not erase any of that overnight. But it marks the end of the specific condition that built it in the first place.

Tourist Information

Location: Chiloé Island (Isla Grande de Chiloé), Los Lagos Region, southern Chile, separated from the mainland by the Chacao Channel.

Opening hours: The island itself has no opening hours. Individual sites vary: most of the UNESCO churches are open daily during daylight hours but may close for services or restoration work, and several close entirely outside the summer season (December to March). Confirm before travelling to a specific church.

Typical visit duration: A minimum of three to four days is needed to see the main churches, Castro’s palafitos, and the Puñihuil penguin colony without rushing. A week allows time to reach the smaller islands of Quinchao and Lemuy and to visit Chiloé National Park on the west coast.

How to get there: Fly into Mocopulli Aerodrome near Castro (around two hours from Santiago) or into El Tepual Airport in Puerto Montt, then travel roughly 60 kilometres by road to the port of Pargua and cross the Chacao Channel by ferry (around 30 to 40 minutes, running every 15 to 30 minutes). Long-distance buses from Santiago and Puerto Montt include the ferry crossing in the ticket price. A bridge across the channel is under construction and expected to open around 2028; until then, the ferry remains the only crossing.

Admission: Most churches and the town of Castro’s palafito neighbourhoods are free to visit. Puñihuil’s boat tours and specific museums charge separately; check official tourism websites for current prices and booking details, as these change seasonally.

Accessibility: Terrain varies widely. Castro’s waterfront and main churches are generally accessible on foot with some uneven ground, but many rural churches and coastal viewpoints involve gravel paths, steps, or unpaved parking areas. The Puñihuil boat tours involve boarding a small vessel from a beach and are not well suited to limited mobility. Children generally do well on the island, though boat trips require supervision.

Facilities: Castro, Ancud, and Dalcahue have full tourist infrastructure, including toilets, cafés, restaurants, and parking. Facilities at individual rural churches and at Puñihuil are more basic, often limited to a small visitor kiosk.

Best time to visit: October to March offers the mildest weather and coincides with the penguin breeding season at Puñihuil. Chiloé’s climate is wet and changeable year-round, so waterproof clothing is worth packing regardless of season. Shoulder months (October, March) offer smaller crowds than peak summer (January, February).

Things to know before visiting Chiloé:

  • Weather changes quickly and rain is common even in summer; layers and waterproof outerwear are more useful than a single heavy coat.
  • Many rural churches are only reachable by car or organised tour, as public transport between smaller villages is limited.
  • Curanto is often served in generous portions; some restaurants and family-run operations require advance booking, particularly outside Castro.
  • Boat tours to Puñihuil do not allow landing on the islets themselves, in order to protect the nesting colony.
  • Spanish is the primary language; English is spoken in tourism-oriented businesses in Castro and Ancud but less reliably elsewhere.

Nearby places of interest:

  • Chiloé National Park, on the island’s west coast, for temperate rainforest, coastal trails, and dune systems.
  • The town of Dalcahue, known for its Sunday craft market and ferry access to Quinchao Island.
  • Quinchao and Lemuy islands, each reachable by short ferry, with additional UNESCO-listed churches.
  • Ancud, the island’s northern port town, with Spanish colonial fort ruins and a regional museum.

Further Reading & Resources:

  • Books: In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin, which includes an account of the Chiloé witch trials.
  • Documentaries: UNESCO’s short film on the Churches of Chiloé, available through the World Heritage Centre.
  • Museums: Museo Regional de Ancud, and the Museo de las Iglesias de Chiloé in Castro.
  • Official websites: UNESCO World Heritage Centre listing for the Churches of Chiloé (whc.unesco.org), and Chile’s national tourism board (chile.travel) for current transport and seasonal information.

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