Among the people of Constitución that night was Pedro Muñoz, a fisherman with a small skiff. When the water came, he did not run. He rowed out to Orrego Island and ferried celebrants across to the riverbank, then turned around and went back for more, making the crossing twice against the chaos of the surging river. He was loading his boat a third time when the third wave came. It swamped his skiff and killed him. He saved the people he could reach and died trying to reach the rest. In a disaster measured in hundreds of lost lives, his is one name that survives because of how he spent his last hour, refusing to leave others behind when leaving would have saved himself.

The cruelty of that night was sharpened by how nearly the town was ready. Only two weeks earlier, residents had been trained for exactly this scenario: if the shaking was strong enough that you could not stay on your feet, head immediately for high ground, because a tsunami was likely to follow. Many heeded it and climbed the hills and lived. But the warning systems that should have confirmed the danger faltered in the hours after the quake, and on the low ground by the river, where the families were, there was no time. The earthquake had destroyed so much that restoring even electricity in the immediate aftermath proved impossible. Constitución had prepared as well as a town can prepare, and still it grieved by the hundreds.

The enduring image of Constitución is not the disaster but a rock. Along the city's coastal edge stands the Piedra de la Iglesia, the Stone of the Church, an immense arched formation some 150 meters long and nine meters high, sculpted by the Pacific into caverns and tunnels that can be explored at low tide. It is the great postcard of the Maule coast, the picture the city has carried for generations, and in 2007 it was declared a Nature Sanctuary by the Chilean state. Local legend holds that lovers who kiss beneath its stone arch are bound for eternity. That this serene landmark survived the same waves that devastated the town below it feels, somehow, like a small mercy: the stone church endured where so much else did not.

Long before the tsunami, Constitución was a working port and, before that, a summer escape. The Chango and Mapuche peoples fished and camped at this river mouth before Spanish galleons used it as a Pacific harbor, and the settlement that grew here was founded in 1794 as Nueva Bilbao, named for the Basque city in Spain. For a time it thrived as a seaside resort, until the rise of the paper and pulp industry, dominated by the great cellulose plant of Celulosa Arauco y Constitución, reshaped both the economy and the landscape into forests of planted eucalyptus and pine. The town is also the terminus of one of Chile's last branch railways, the historic Ramal that winds down the Maule valley from Talca, a slow and beautiful survivor of the country's railroad age.