Qualla: Nueva Imperial

Nueva Imperial: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On December 1, 1989, in a town most Chileans had never heard of, a presidential candidate sat down with leaders of the Mapuche, Aymara, and Rapa Nui peoples and signed a promise. The candidate was Patricio Aylwin, soon to become the first president of a Chile emerging from dictatorship, and the document took the name of the place where it was signed: the Acuerdo de Nueva Imperial. For people who had been pushed to the margins for a century, it offered constitutional recognition, a development corporation, a voice. That this moment happened here, in a small city on the Cautín River, was no accident. Nueva Imperial sits in the heart of Araucanía, where the Mapuche presence has never gone away.

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Nueva Imperial: The City That Was

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 aban...

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Nueva Imperial: Watercolor on the River

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Nueva Imperial: A Land That Made a Poet

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Nueva Imperial: Mapuche Country, Still

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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