Castro is the third-oldest continuously inhabited city in Chile, after Santiago and La Serena. The Spanish marshal Martín Ruiz de Gamboa founded it on February 12, 1567, naming it Santiago de Castro in honor of Lope García de Castro, then viceroy of Peru. For most of its life it was a remote outpost at the far southern edge of the Spanish empire, cut off by water and weather, raided by Dutch corsairs, and rebuilt after fires and earthquakes more times than anyone bothered to count. That isolation shaped everything. While the rest of Chile drifted toward the mainland and the modern world, Chiloé kept its own architecture, its own myths, and its own way of building in wood.

The palafitos belong to the 1800s, when fishing and the timber trade brought a boom to the island and working families crowded the shoreline. Building over the water solved a simple problem: it put the boat and the home in the same place. The clusters that survive today line the Gamboa and Pedro Montt neighborhoods, just a short walk from the plaza. Earthquakes and tsunamis have thinned their numbers over the decades, and for years they were dismissed as slums. Now many have been restored as guesthouses and cafes, their weathered shingles repaired and their stilts replaced, and the view of them at sunset has become the island's signature image.

Above the waterfront, on the Plaza de Armas, stands the Church of San Francisco, the largest wooden church on the archipelago and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is impossible to miss. The Italian architect Eduardo Provasoli gave it a neo-Gothic shape, and at some point the people of Castro painted it a startling mustard yellow trimmed in lavender, a color scheme so bold it divides visitors and locals alike. Behind the galvanized-iron facade, the entire structure is wood, shaped by carpenters who built fishing boats. It is the most spectacular member of the family of churches that earned this island its place on the world heritage list.

Chiloé eats differently from the rest of Chile, and Castro is where to taste it. The island is one of the original homelands of the cultivated potato, and dozens of native varieties in pink, purple, black, and yellow still grow here. The signature dish is curanto: shellfish, sausage, smoked pork, chicken, and dense potato breads called milcao and chapalele, traditionally cooked in a pit lined with hot stones and covered with the broad leaves of the nalca plant. The flavor is smoky and oceanic, and eating it the old way, dug steaming from the ground, is as close as a meal gets to ceremony. Restaurants and cafes cluster along Calle Blanco, running from the southern end of the plaza down to the harbor.

Castro sits roughly halfway down the island, which makes it the natural base for everything else. Ferries and buses fan out to the smaller islands off the eastern coast, to Quinchao with its own ancient churches at Achao and Curaco de Vélez, and south toward Chiloé National Park, where temperate rainforest meets the open Pacific. The island's deep mythology travels with you: the witches of Quicaví, the ghost ship Caleuche, the gnome-like Trauco said to haunt the forests. Spend a few days, and Castro stops being a stop on the way to Patagonia and becomes a place with a stubborn identity all its own.