The name on the map is the second one. The first, La Imperial, was founded in 1551 by the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, who imagined it among the great cities of colonial Chile, perhaps even its capital. The Mapuche had other plans. The settlement was destroyed and finally abandoned in 1600 under the pressure of their resistance, and for centuries the site lay empty. When Chileans returned in 1882 to rebuild nearby, they gave a related settlement the Mapudungun name Carahue, which means "the city that was," a quiet acknowledgment of everything that had stood and fallen there. Imperial itself was refounded a short distance away and became Nueva Imperial, the new beginning of an old ambition.

There is a softer Nueva Imperial too. The town was once nicknamed the Watercolor City for its brightly painted houses, washes of color spread across the hillsides above the river. It is split in two by the water and by a large hill, with the lower district called El Bajo and the upper one El Alto; from the heights you can see the snow-cones of the Villarrica, Llaima, and Lonquimay volcanoes standing over the countryside. The Cautín and Chol-Chol rivers meet here to form the Imperial, which runs down to the Pacific at Puerto Saavedra. Spanning the water is a graceful old bridge, kept now for its beauty rather than its traffic, and credited locally to the workshop of the engineer Gustave Eiffel.

Across the Chol-Chol River lies Villa Almagro, and in 1900 a child was born there who would grow up to be one of Chile's finest nature poets. Gilberto Concha Riffo took the pen name Juvencio Valle, and the southern forests where he was raised never left his verse. In 1966 he won the Premio Nacional de Literatura, Chile's highest literary honor, and his hometown named him an illustrious son. His old house still stands. It is a fitting origin, for this is a green and watered country of native forest and araucaria, the kind of landscape that teaches a writer to look closely, and Valle spent a lifetime singing it.

More than the bridge or the colors, what defines Nueva Imperial is its people. The commune holds one of the largest concentrations of indigenous population in the region, and Mapuche language, crafts, food, and custom are living parts of daily life rather than museum pieces. Each June, the Mapuche mark Wüñoy Tripantü, the return of the sun and the new year, around the winter solstice. The Acuerdo signed here in 1989 promised much, and much of it went unfulfilled or arrived slowly, including the recognition that took decades to win. But the choice of this town as the place to make that promise was telling. To talk about Chile's future with its first peoples, you come to Araucanía, and in Araucanía you come to Nueva Imperial.