Qualla: Las Raíces Tunnel

Las Raíces Tunnel: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Drivers enter Las Raices one direction at a time, headlights swallowed by 4.5 kilometres of rock, and emerge on the far side of the Andes. There is room for only one lane, so a toll station upstream meters the traffic and waits for the bore to clear. For most of the twentieth century, this narrow tunnel through the mountains was the longest road tunnel in all of South America, a record it held for decades, and it remains one of the great quiet feats of Chilean engineering.

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Las Raíces Tunnel: A Line Between Two Oceans

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The tunnel pierces the southern Andes about 700 kilometres south of Santiago, carrying Route 181-CH from the city of Temuco toward the Pino Hachado pass and the Argentine border beyond. Trace that road on a map and its ambition becomes clear. It forms part of a continental link f...

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Las Raíces Tunnel: Eight Years Through the Mountain

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The idea took decades to become a hole in the rock. Feasibility studies began in 1911, the final blueprints were ready in 1929, and construction started in 1930. Crews worked from both ends, one camp set in the Sierra Nevada and another at Boca Norte, boring toward each other thr...

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Las Raíces Tunnel: When the Trains Came Through

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The tunnel led a second life on rails. From 1956 the railway between Pua and Lonquimay ran straight through the same mountain bore, and for nearly four decades trains rattled along this section until the line fell silent in the 1990s. The history of a place like this is easy to o...

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Las Raíces Tunnel: A Lifeline in Winter

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the people of Lonquimay, the town on the far side, the tunnel is not a curiosity but a lifeline. Their valley sits in the high Andes where winters are ferocious, the temperature plunging toward minus 25 degrees and snow piling deep enough to close the mountain passes for mont...

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Las Raíces Tunnel: The Road Not Taken

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For those unwilling to surrender the view to a tunnel, the old way still exists. The Cuesta de Las Raices, a scenic gravel road, climbs over the mountains instead of through them, branching off about 5 kilometres before the western portal or 11 before the eastern. It is slower an...

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