Bridge Spans Centuries of Isolation

On the island of sea monsters and ghost ships, the thing some people fear most is a gravity-defying creation of modern man -- a 1 1/2 -mile-long bridge across the water to the mainland.

For centuries, the Pacific Ocean has sheltered Chiloe Island from change. Long after Chile had established its republican government, warlocks still ruled the island. The people built quaint churches where wood took the place of marble and brick. Even today, the priests dip their hands into baptismal fonts carved from logs.

“When I first came here, I felt I had stepped into a time machine,” said Rolando Quirland, a former city dweller who moved to a settlement on the remote western coast of the island 15 years ago. Residents chilled wine and milk in the icy streams. They had no electricity. No phones. No television.

But the island has fast-forwarded, acquiring all those modern conveniences in less than a decade, an echo of the economic boom gripping the rest of Chile.

Now the bridge may be coming too, a $524-million project that will link sleepy Chiloe to the bustling mainland city of Puerto Montt and the Pan-American Highway.

The 1.6-mile suspension bridge would be the longest in Latin America. Part of an ambitious set of public works planned to commemorate Chile’s bicentennial in 2010, the project is becoming a symbol of this country’s push to graduate from the Third World.

“The Pan-American Highway will not end in Puerto Montt; it will reach south to Quellon,” on the southern end of Chiloe, said Sen. Sergio Paez, a leading supporter of the project. “And 10 years from now, Chiloe will be a totally different place than it is now. It will be developed and industrialized.”

But in Chiloe, as elsewhere in this country, there are those who ask: Is Chile embracing modernity at the cost of its soul?

“Everything changes, everything moves more quickly,” said Luis Munoz, a fisherman and lifelong resident here in Curaco de Velez who opposes the bridge. “You try to keep your traditional culture. That’s why people come here. If you change that, Chiloe will be just another part of Chile.”

Munoz and his son still squeeze out a living from the ocean the same way people have for centuries: by going out to sea in search of trout, and by stretching nets along the muddy tidal flats that begin a hundred yards from the vegetable garden and picket fence of their home.

Chiloe represents an untouched innocence for many Chileans, even those who have never set foot here.

“It is such an extraordinary place that every Chilean and every tourist must visit it at least once,” author Isabel Allende once wrote, “even at the risk of staying forever.”

Home to about 154,000 people, most of them of Spanish-Indian descent, Chiloe is an archipelago of about 40 islands, including the main one, called Isla Grande de Chiloe in Spanish. The residents fish and raise cattle and sheep. On the coast, houses rise over the tidal flats on stilts. Every day at noon, a horn sounds in the bigger towns, testing the tsunami warning system, set up after one had devastated parts of Chiloe in 1960.

Chiloe’s folklore, a unique combination of Spanish and indigenous legends, has endured because of the island’s isolation, said Walter Velasquez, an amateur Chiloe mythologist.

In local lore, Chiloe was separated from South America when the serpent of the sea (coicoi- vilu) and the serpent of the land (tenten-vilu) battled, creating a chasm that filled with sea water.

Even now, in the island’s oral traditions, a veritable zoo of monsters and magical creatures can be found in Chiloe’s forests and the surrounding ocean. There is the trauco, an elf-like man with a cone-shaped hat and the strength of a giant. And the camahueto, part calf and part unicorn, whose ivory horn glows in moonlight.

It isn’t hard to find people who claim to have seen the caleuche, a ghost ship whose crew is made up of the souls of the recently departed. On certain foggy days, when the conditions are just right, islanders say, it’s possible to see this ship sailing on the waters between the archipelago’s islands.

“If you follow this ship, it turns into a floating log or a sea lion,” Velasquez said. “Some say that if a ship is in trouble, the caleuche will tow it to port at dizzying speeds.”

The island was the last foothold of the Spanish Empire in South America, under its control till 1826. Subsequently, a group of Indian warlocks known as “The Upright Province” dominated the island for decades. They resolved disputes among peasants and maintained a network of “functionaries” who defied the authority of the newly independent Chilean government. Many people feared them -- it was said a warlock could have an entire family killed with a single spell -- until the infamous “Chiloe Witch Trials” of 1880, which ended with many of the warlocks imprisoned.

Getting to the island requires a 30-minute ferry ride over the Chacao Channel. When the weather turns bad, as often happens at Chiloe’s colder latitudes, the ferries can’t cross. Everyone on the island is stranded.

“If your baby gets sick and the ferries are not working, you have no way of getting to the good hospital” in Puerto Montt, says Patricia Ruiz, a mother of two. “I hope they build the bridge.”

Flor Bustamante, 17, sells woolen handicrafts. She favors the project too, but expresses the islanders’ biggest fear -- that the bridge will bring more “delinquents” and “con men” from the mainland.

“It will bring good things and bad,” she says. “We’re not going to be an island anymore. We’re going to be part of the continent, is what people say. But it will bring more tourists, more customers.”

Sen. Paez and other supporters of the bridge talk in the same upbeat, can-do tone that infected California in the 1960s. They see Chiloe, the continent’s second-largest island, with its many miles of unpaved roads and sleepy villages and ports as a place waiting to be tamed and incorporated into the rest of Chile. Salmon harvested in the region’s frigid fjords will be rushed by truck to the airport at Puerto Montt, and from there to markets in Asia and Europe.

“Why shouldn’t we be confident?” Paez says. “Businessmen come from all over the world to make investments here.”

An international consortium, led by the German construction giant Hochtief and including American Bridge and VINCI, a French firm, won a contract in January to build and operate the bridge and ancillary roads. The bridge’s central tower would be higher than the tallest building in Santiago, Chile’s capital. Construction could start as early as 2007.

“This is an emblematic and historic project for this region,” Public Works Minister Javier Etcheberry said in December, when the winning bid was announced. “This giant step shows how things should be done in this country.”

A few days later, after months of corruption scandals linked to public works projects, Etcheberry was forced to resign after a bridge 150 miles south of Santiago collapsed. Four cars plunged into a river, but no one was killed.

The Chiloe bridge project is already leading land speculators to buy up property, residents say

“What these people from outside are offering is just a pittance, but to the people who live here it seems like a fortune,” says Carlos Gonzalez, a writer, artist and native of Ancud, the island’s largest city. “There is a fever to sell quickly, before the boom ends.”

Gonzalez fears that the bridge will turn Chiloe’s towns into little more than bedroom communities to Puerto Montt. Residents will commute from the island to work and shop in the big city, which would be less than an hour’s drive away.

“Life moves at a different pace here,” Gonzalez said. “People still do things in groups. On the weekends, we might share a meal with our neighbors. And on workdays, everyone goes home at lunchtime to spend a couple of hours with their families. If we all have to go work in Puerto Montt, we will begin to lose that.”

Chiloe is famous for its many town festivals. Every June 24th, on the island of Cailin, for example, residents gather for the procession of St. John the Baptist. Luis Neum, a Roman Catholic priest here, says the celebration is a Huilliche Indian ritual marking the end of the Southern Hemisphere winter that has been restaged in Catholic garb.

“All the people in the procession gather in a circle, which is the way the Indians used to do it,” Neum said.

The priest remembers growing up on an island farm with the Indian-influenced rituals, many of which have slowly disappeared.

“Every spring, my mother would perform the blessing of the seeds,” Neum said. It was a solemn rite the children were not allowed to watch. “Now this isn’t done anymore. It’s seen as something backward, something to mock.”

The church in the town of Chonchi where Neum celebrates Mass was built on an old Indian burial ground. Rough-hewn, round pillars of wood cut to imitate stone hold up the roof. Other pieces of wood, cut and painted in flowing white and blue stripes, hang like curtains behind the wooden crucifix.

“We have this beautiful church, but if we want to do anything in it, we have to consult with the government,” Neum said. “The local people supposedly are not experts enough to work on it, even though they are the ones who built it.”

Neum feels that the churches have become commodities for the tourist industry. The bridge, he says, “will be one more blow against Chiloe’s indigenous culture.”

Already, the cash economy is eating away at the old way of life, Neum and other longtime residents say.

Thousands of people have given up farm work for the steady income available in factories that process salmon and other seafood products. Fishermen are entangled more than ever in the boom-bust cycles of the world markets.

“The result of all this development is people are poorer now than they were before,” said Gonzalez, the writer.

He says, as do other opponents of the bridge, that the government has never formally consulted residents about the project.

Still, supporters have pressed forward. Several times last year, they staged rallies at the ferry crossings, shutting down ferry service for several hours. Many say the momentum of the project is unstoppable.

“One day, the postcards you see of Chiloe won’t be of our churches anymore,” Gonzalez said. Nor will they be of the old fishing boats puttering out to sea, or the bays of still blue water.

Instead, Gonzalez fears, the postcards labeled “Chiloe” will be of an architectural marvel of the early 21st century, a suspension bridge of stainless steel girders and wire that will soar over the place where the serpents of legends once met in battle.