Puerto Montt

We woke up this morning anchored in Puerto Montt, Chile. We looked out the window and were greeted with an overcast sky and pelting rain.

Our Zaandam

Puerto Montt was our first port of call and after a few hundred meter journey to shore we had until 4:30 to return to the ship for a 5 pm sailing.

Puerto Montt is a port city of around 200,000 in southern Chile’s Lake District.  It is known as a gateway to the Andes mountains and the Patagonian fjords.  It was established in 1853 and most of the buildings were built from wood in the 19th century.  The devastating earthquake of June 20, 1960, ensured that not many of the original structures remain.

A Little Damp But We Made The Best of It!

The process of tendering off the boat proved relatively smooth.  We collected our tender tickets and sat in a public area to wait for our call.  We had only sat down for less than half an hour when our number came up.  We quickly descended to the bottom deck, stepped onto the boat, and were whisked to shore.

Three of These Guys At Work All Day

The advertised excursions in this port all centered around drives into the mountains to view the fauna, foliage and nearby volcano.  We’re glad we didn’t spend the money.  The socked in weather would have hidden the views.

We decided to walk the town and take in the fish market, artisanal shops, and the Historical Museum.

We donned our rain gear and set out.  Puerto Montt is a fishing village and salmon are in abundance in these waters.  The market was full of huge pink salmon and other seafood.

The artisanal shops are mostly full of tourist trinkets.  There were many wood carvings and paintings but the highlights were the alpaca knitwear.

We spent a few hours in the shops and then we were off to the museum.  Puerto Montt has an interesting history.  It was first settled by the indigenous Mapuche peoples, that were attracted to its protected waters and abundant sea life.  In the 1840s things changed.  Chile adopted a country-specific immigration law to attract German people to the area.  While there is no official documented reasons on display, it is speculated that Germans were chosen as a way of bringing some northern European genes to add to the “shorter” “smaller” Chilean physical characteristic gene pool.  We didn’t see any 2 meters +, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Chileans walking around the town so I'm not sure it worked.

German citizens were offered free land to settle in the area.  Initially, there were about 6000 attracted to the offer.  The museum is Spanish only but the pictures tell the story of the immigration and have many artifacts as evidence of the German settlement.  Some buildings appeared to have architectural lines that reminded us of those in Germany. Unlike most South American communities, a Protestant church is the center of the religious community rather than Catholic.  We were told that German is still the preferred language in some of the smaller satellite communities and that some schools are still taught entirely in German.

Drenched and hungry, we returned to the boat in the afternoon well before the scheduled departure.