Little known History of South America

“South America, there’s no history there!”
I must say I was inclined to agree with my colleague on this topic. We Europeans seem to have a very narrow scope when it comes to valuing our old colonies’ histories and cultures, I suppose in lots of ways we always have. For instance even the most uninterested student who has been taught a smidgen of history will have some recollection of the mighty Incas and will of course have seen pictures of Macchu Pichu and Nazca. They will also understand perhaps that our Iberian neighbours colonised so much of South America that it is “practically Spain,” as one friend casually announced before I left. The population in general seem to know nothing however of the great pre Inca civilisation of Tiwanaku whose people devised a way of time keeping remarkably similar to our Gregorian calendar. They have little knowledge of the great convict fleets from Britain to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales that passed through Rio de Janeiro in order to maintain favourable winds, (and that the poor souls aboard often spent more time in port than on the ocean!) They are also pretty ignorant of the great mining industries in the Atacama desert where Britain and her entrepreneurial pioneers assisted Chile in its War of the Pacific against what is today one of the poorest countries in the world.
So before i left olde England i made a point of visiting all the historic places i could. I spent lots of time in York gazing up at the lofty spires of the Minster and wandering aimlessly along the ancient alleyways. Yes I stumbled along the cobbles of the old roman Via Principalis and gazed up at the statue of Constantine, who was proclaimed emperor of the known world right here. I also visited the late gothic masterpiece of Kings College Chapel in Cambridge...just to ensure, like a camel, I could sustain myself along my journey of historical draught, at least until reached Macchu Picchu.
Rio De Janeiro is a wonderful city in a truly spectacular location. Surrounded by round topped tropical hills, randomly thrusting out of the sea and backed by endangered coastal rainforest of a thousand shades of green. The physical fabric of the city however has been eroded by insensitive post war development accommodating the need for great financial institutions and terrifying gated condominiums. These rise like great concrete walls blocking the city from its still magnificent beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.
But dig a little and there you will find some fascinating facts. For instance Rio was actually the residence of the Portuguese royal family once upon a time. The colonial era also left behind some fantastic villas especially in the area of Santa Teresa where clambouring up the hill are great mansions once belonging to the rich and famous of new world society. Did you also know that Captain James Cook was most put out when he visited Rio on his first voyage around the world? Apparently the authorities didn’t show due respect which greatly perturbed the great British explorer. Even the great Charles Darwin thought the rainforest around Rio was the most beautiful he had ever seen.
Brazil is a mix of many different cultures and creeds and it shows in the faces of the people and the micro culturalism of the country. On my trip south in Brasil this mix of cultures and diversity was illustrated in a unique way. After staying in the coastal island of Santa Catarina I headed inland to explore a little bit more of this gigantic country. After an hour or so the landscape changed and the green hills, streams and cows casually chewing the grass suddenly didn’t look alien at all and when I saw a small shop at the side of the road selling ripe red apples, long sausages hanging from the eaves and giant jars of honey this place was suddenly reminiscent of a small alpine village. Even more so when on entering the lady was not dark skinned and dark eyed with the natural coco beauty of the north of brasil but she was pasty and freckled and had a rather odd accent. It turned out that I was on the outskirts of a place called Alfredo Wagner. Now that doesn’t sound very Portuguese does it? This village was a gem, nestled between some spectacular scenery and with more than a whiff of old Bavaria about it. The bars used the same calligraphic scrollwork to sell their beers and some places even sold sauerkraut alongside the Brazilian staple of rice and beans! However the strangest thing I saw here, nestled amongst a small group of modern almost suburban housing was a dwelling that presented itself with a hand painted sign as Papa Noel’s house. Indeed this was a cottage that could have come straight from Heidi and the little middle aged man who came out to great us could have been a young version of Pinocchio’s father. This man was a master woodworker and every year he opens his house for all the children in the village and dresses up as Papa Noel. Under his porch he has an entire model village complete with little handcrafted figurines all made by himself. It was a fascinating place and got even stranger when I saw the palm trees and ferns behind his house and heard that he didn’t speak any Portuguese until he was 6 as everyone spoke German.
There are a lot of German peoples in Brazil, They have cultivated the land and form some of the most wealthy and stable political areas of the country. Originally expelled from Europe in the 19th century many came here to seek religious freedom. Our Papa Noel even remembered members of the original indigenous communities here who now seem to have inter bred or succumbed to the foreign infections of the Europeans.

The second place that I at least knew nothing of, was the ancient pre Inca city of Tiwanaku. This huge area of mainly religious structures pre dates the Inca by at least a thousand years. At its peak between 300 and 1000AD this place high on the Andean Altiplano in what is now northern Bolivia near Lake Titicaca had massive implications both culturally and economically for the entire mid Andean region of South America. Its crowning and most fascinating features are perhaps the Sun and Moon gates. These substantial square structures, one of which was almost taken away by the British in the 19th century to put in the British museum, stand ominously now re erected as near as possible to their original sites on line with the solstices. The Moon gate in particular was fascinating in its decoration as our guide explained the gate actually contains divisions that represent 7 days of the week and 12 months of the year. This is fascinating in the fact that it is pretty much the same system of dates and days that we use today in our Gregorian calendar.
In the centre of the Tiwanaku complex stands a large pyramid that is currently being investigated and reconstructed using the excavated material which is formed and dried into mud bricks. The result is a 5 tiered pyramid that apparently once contained a sacred pond on its summit which the high priests used to gaze at the stars in the reflection collected in the pool. This again is remarkably similar to the technique that is used in modern astronomy whereby the image is reflected off a giant mirror.
These structures form a trinity of temples that represent the earth, heavens and underworld. Sci fi nuts will be intrigued by the temple of the underworld which is sunk into the ground in front of the sun gate and contains the stone heads of various important figures somehow associated with Tiwanaku. The oddity comes from the fact that many believe these heads do not look human and indeed one or two are resemblent of the characteristic little green men from mars!

My next port of call was the Peruvian city of Arequipa. This place feels as if it is slightly off the tourist trail and most people visit here to visit the worlds deepest canyon, the Colca Canyon. However Arequipa’s other attractions are its proximity to the huge snow capped volcanoes of the Andes, its fantastic colonnaded main square and its many fine churches, the most notable of these being the Nunnery of Santa Catalina. This huge ’citadel’ sits in the north eastern quarter of the city and was completely off limits to anyone but enrolled nuns since its foundation in 1580 until the 1970’s when the nuns were forced to open their citadel. If like me you are intrigued by the secrecy of such places and just cant help but peak through keyholes in National Trust properties just to the see the rooms that are off limits then you will love this place. The majority of the area has been opened to the public now and as soon as one walks through the huge wooden doors and into the first beautifully coloured courtyard you really do feel honoured to be allowed here. The whole citadel is divided into a series of colonnaded courtyards surrounded by streets and corridors that lead to each of the individual nuns cells. The vibrant blues and reds make this place the envy of the most pretentious boutique hotel and the carving of the columns and tiled flooring oozes that great sense of history created by thousands of years of footsteps.
The nuns cells are accessed off actual mini streets that link this initially confusing place into an ordered whole. The cells were by no means identical but mostly started with a single main room with a door onto the street, followed by secondary rooms and each had a courtyard where wonderfully blackened clay ovens still formed the centrepiece of what where once the nuns private kitchens. The atmosphere was similar to finding an old deserted building and being the only one there because the complex never felt crowded. There was also a great little café which sold such things as ‘Without remorse chocolate brownie’ along with various other surprisingly nice cakes named after the seven deadly sins! The visit takes a good afternoon to get through but my favourite time was when the sun had just set and all through the complex candles and oil lamps were lit, this caused me to have a second walk around the whole place just to soak up this magical place.

By the time I reached northern Chile the cultures and history of this amazing continent were still milling around my mind and I was struggling to comprehend the complexities of indigenous peoples and their rich culture with the colonising European culture which was in lots of ways so familiar to me but in other ways was subtly but magnificently different. However the last place I visited really had a wild west flavour to it. I was staying in Iquique on the Pacific Coast. At first this place appeared as a nice but ordinary city next to the sea with a great promenade. But on my first night after wandering around trying to find the centre I stumbled upon the old main street. All my curiosities of what old 19th century Chile was like were rewarded with the old main street containing a whole collection of wonderful timber stores, hotels and bars. It was just like walking down main street in an old cowboy film. The close boarded timber fronts mostly sported wonderful verandas and balconies simple but wonderfully decorated. This stretch of street also had a tram and extended for about half a mile. This satisfied my lust for history that in so many places was difficult to find but my main reason for coming to Iquique was to travel I inland into the driest desert in the world to visit a real life ghost town. The town was called Humberstone. It was situated about 40km from Iquique adjacent the great Pacific Highway. Whereas Iquique being next to the coast often had its fair share of fog this place always seemed dry and hot. I travelled there by bus and hopped off onto the dusty ground into what at first one might think of as a real functioning town with houses and telegraph wires and vehicles. But when I crossed the road there was only one home that was inhabited and that looked like it was the caretakers house. Beyond it was a wide street leading off towards what looked like a giant flat topped spoil heap at the end. On either side were low rise pre fab houses with corrugated tin roofs most of which still had old timber fences and others with quite ornate trellising. Humberstone was a true ghost town. It was founded in 1872 by the British owned Peru Nitrate Company and named after its founder James Thomas Humberstone as a Nitrate and Saltpeter mine. The business was a great success and a railway led towards Iquique where the stuff was exported. Such rich resources led Peru and Bolivia to declare war on Chile in 1879 in which Chile was greatly supported by the colonial powers and resulted in Bolivia loosing its access to the Pacific coast. Humberstone subsequently became very rich and the facilities on site included a swimming pool and a wonderful theatre situated within the market square. The primary school was particularly interesting and because it was built by the British it had lots of similarities with a 19th century school in Britain only it was made of wood and had basketball hoops outside. The town was finally abandoned in the 1960’s and has been left pretty much as it was. The most enticing area however is reached by walking from the town up a short slope to where the big industry was located. There’s a surprising amount of buildings still standing and because there is so little rain in this part of the world the structures and machinery are not rusted away and corroded but still in situ. The giant corrugated iron sheds where the nitrate was processed still contain dials and giant cogs and conveyer belts. The offices for the foreman and the store rooms where the employees collected their work gear and supplies are all still there and what’s more still accessible. Outside the railway lines run onwards toward on their lonely journey to the coast before being buried by the dust and sand through this vast post apocalyptic landscape.
I left Humberstone with a much greater understanding of the history and cultural diversities contained within South America. I really felt that my journey of understanding was complete. When I set out I expected to see some European style cities and was looking forward to seeing Machu Picchu and the Nasca Lines and learning more about the incredibly rich cultures that existed here before being exploited by their colonial impostors. But I never expected to see such places as Tiwanaku. I never really comprehended that the great empires of these civilisations were just as great as anything we had ever had in Europe. The new world settlements because they used locally available materials and styles and because there were inhabited by local people enabled the whole to take on its own unique culture. For example Humberstone and Iquique. Arequipa could have been in Spain but the rich culture of the indigenous peoples still shows strongly. Even the religious art in the Nunnery was painted and thereby interpreted by indigenous peoples leading to an almost covert multiculturalism that cant have been noticed by the colonial overlords or how could it have survived? The colonisation of these places arguably had the intention of wiping out such cultures, but what has happened has been an evolution into true ethnically diverse nations with their own unique culture and historical assets…enough to satisfy the most naïve ‘historically big headed’ European .
I now feel recharged on culture, in fact I’m pretty much full to the brim. Just as well really I guess, because my next challenge…is Australia!

Note: Tiwanaku and Humberstone are both listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.