Qualla: Andes Museum 1972

Andes Museum 1972: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mevrob, CC BY-SA 3.0. A worn poncho hangs in a display case near the entrance, and visitors often pause longer there than they expect to. It belonged to Sergio Catalán, a Chilean muleteer who, in December 1972, glimpsed two skeletal strangers gesturing across a mountain river and chose to believe they were real. The Andes Museum 1972 occupies a modest space in Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo's historic quarter, and it tells one of the most extraordinary survival stories of the twentieth century with quiet, deliberate restraint. There is no spectacle here. There is only the evidence of what people endured, and what they did for one another, seventy-two days high in the snow.

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Image: Mevrob | CC BY-SA 3.0

Andes Museum 1972: Forty-Five Who Boarded

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mevrob, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 13 October 1972, a chartered Fairchild FH-227D lifted off from Montevideo's Carrasco airport bound for Santiago, Chile. Aboard were forty-five people: the players of the Old Christians Club rugby team, along with friends and family members who had come to share the trip. They ...

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Image: Mevrob | CC BY-SA 3.0

Andes Museum 1972: Seventy-Two Days

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mevrob, CC BY-SA 3.0. What the survivors faced has become legend, but the museum insists on the human scale of it. There was no food on a glacier above 3,500 meters, no shelter beyond the broken fuselage, no warmth that night temperatures did not steal back. An avalanche buried the wreck weeks in, kil...

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Image: Mevrob | CC BY-SA 3.0

Andes Museum 1972: The Long Walk Out

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ValeCalero97, CC BY-SA 4.0. Rescue did not come because no one was looking in the right place; the search had been called off, and the survivors heard the news on a small transistor radio. So two of them, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, climbed out. They scaled a peak they had assumed hid Chile beyond it...

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Image: ValeCalero97 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Andes Museum 1972: Why a Museum

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mevrob, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Andes Museum 1972 opened in 2013, a private institution later declared of cultural interest by Uruguay's education ministry and its ministry of tourism and sport. It gathers objects, documents, and photographs from the disaster, with text in Spanish and English, and a visitor...

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Image: Mevrob | CC BY-SA 3.0