Qualla: Tomé Tragedy

Tomé Tragedy: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aeveraal, CC BY-SA 4.0. Their team had just won. On the night of February 9, 2013, a bus of O'Higgins supporters left the Estadio CAP in Talcahuano carrying the easy happiness of fans whose side has taken the match two to nil. They were heading up the coast toward Dichato, along a road called the Cuesta Caracol that climbs and twists above the sea near Tomé. Somewhere on those curves the bus went over the edge and fell roughly a hundred meters into a ravine. Sixteen people did not come home. It remains the deadliest disaster involving football fans in Chilean history.

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Image: Aeveraal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tomé Tragedy: The Curve Above the Sea

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cisumiv, CC BY-SA 4.0. The coast road north of Concepción is beautiful and unforgiving, switchbacking through hills that drop steeply to the Pacific. The Cuesta Caracol earns its name, caracol meaning snail, from the tight spiraling bends that fold back on themselves as the road gains height. For a bus...

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Image: Cisumiv | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tomé Tragedy: Sixteen Names

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cisumiv, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dead were confirmed the next day, and the list is hard to read, because so many of them had barely begun. Most were teenagers. Rodrigo Valdés Aliaga was fifteen. So were Andrés Osorio Cantillana, Luis Contreras Aedo, and others. Joaquín Ávila Muñoz and Matías Droguett Carrasc...

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Image: Cisumiv | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tomé Tragedy: A City and a Club in Mourning

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cisumiv, CC BY-SA 4.0. Grief moved fast through two cities. O'Higgins is the pride of Rancagua, hundreds of kilometers north, and the news emptied the joy out of a season that had been going well. Days of mourning were declared in Rancagua and in Tomé, and across the leagues of Chile's football associa...

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Image: Cisumiv | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tomé Tragedy: How a Club Remembers

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aeveraal, CC BY-SA 4.0. The supporters' group affected was the Trinchera Celeste, the Sky-Blue Trench, named for the club's colors. In the months that followed, O'Higgins built memorials so its dead would not fade into a date on a calendar. Ten months after the crash, the club inaugurated a memorial at ...

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Image: Aeveraal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tomé Tragedy: What the Road Holds

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cisumiv, CC BY-SA 4.0. Years later, the Cuesta Caracol still climbs above Tomé as it always did, and most who drive it know nothing of what happened on a February night in 2013. That is how roads are; they keep no memory of their own. The remembering is left to the living, to a club that plays beneath ...

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Image: Cisumiv | CC BY-SA 4.0