The colonization began with a vision and a sales pitch. Bernhard Eunom Philippi, a German expatriate, had been lobbying the Chilean government since 1842 to bring his countrymen to the empty-looking forests of the south. Chile, eager to populate a frontier it barely controlled, eventually agreed, though it rewarded Philippi awkwardly by posting him as governor of distant Magallanes, where he was killed by indigenous people in 1852. The work passed to Vicente Pérez Rosales, who sailed to Europe, gathered German families, and returned to settle them along the shores of Lake Llanquihue. Many of these emigrants were fleeing the failed German revolutions of 1848, trading political defeat at home for raw land at the end of the earth.

The most celebrated of the new arrivals was Carl Anwandter, who reached Valdivia in 1850 after taking part in Prussia's 1848 uprising. He is remembered for a sentence that became almost a creed for the immigrants, a pledge to become honorable Chileans, and for something more tangible: in 1851 he founded Chile's first beer brewery. The Germans came as artisans, farmers, and merchants, and they brought a culture of wage labor, craft, and industry that the region had lacked. Their churches, schools, and steep-roofed houses still define the look of towns like Frutillar and Puerto Varas, and Puerto Montt itself grew rapidly as a colonization port from 1853.

The land was not as empty as the brochures implied, and clearing it was brutal. To open ground for settlers who had no livelihood but farming, vast tracts of ancient forest were deliberately burned. In 1851, on Pérez Rosales's orders, a man named Pichi Juan set fire to the woods of Chan Chan between Osorno and La Unión; another notorious blaze consumed the slow-growing Fitzroya forests between Puerto Varas and Puerto Montt during a drought in 1863. The smoke clearing also obscured a harder truth: this was Huilliche and Mapuche territory, and the colonization that enriched the newcomers came at the expense of indigenous communities whose claims to the land would echo through Chilean courts for more than a century.

The deepest German legacy turned out to be spoken. A local dialect, Lagunen-deutsch, grew from the speech of Bavaria, Baden, and the Rhineland, and German seeded itself into the everyday Spanish of the south. Across a swath of country reaching all the way to the Aysén Region, the word for blackberry became murra rather than the standard mora, the rolled rr mimicking a guttural German sound that Spanish speakers found hard to manage. Children played marbles in a game they called bochas, from the German bocciaspiel, instead of the bolitas used to the north. Most German Chileans now grow up speaking Spanish first, with German as a second or third tongue, but the borrowed words remain, fossils of a remarkable encounter.