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History
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Before the incursions of either Mapuche or white settlers, the Nahuel Huapi area was the domain of the Poyas, the Vuriloches, the Pehuelches, and the Puelches, who navigated on the lake. These groups used the region's mountain passes to conduct trade with their western, Mapuche counterparts. The discovery of these routes became an obsession of early Spanish exporers in Chile, many of whom were desperate to hunt down the fabulous wealth of the City of the Caesars that was rumoured to exist in these parts. Early expeditions were frustrated and knowledge of the passes' whereabouts reverted to being a closely guarded indigenous secret until the late seventeenth century.
The history of white presence in the region really begins with the Jesuit father, Nicolas Mascardi , who was despatched by the Viceroy of Peru and Chile to found a mission in the area in 1672. The job proved too tough, in the end, even for the Jesuits: the indigenous tribes despatched Mascardi and several subsequent fathers - this time to meet their maker - and, in 1717, destroyed the mission once and for all. Past experience of Spanish slaving expeditions, such as the one conducted by Juan Fernandez in 1620, probably had much to do with this hostile attitude. Fearing the image of the Virgin, however, they apparently wrapped it in horsehide and hid it in the forest nearby, where it was recovered by another Jesuit father and taken to Chiloe and then Concepcion. Sadly, the Virgin of Nahuel Huapi disappeared in the mid-nineteenth century. The local indigenous groups took one seventeenth-century Jesuit introduction more to their hearts than the Virgin: the humble apple or manzana . Used for brewing chicha , wild apples became so popular here that the region's Mapuche tribes became known as Manzaneros . It was this confederation that was led by the renowned cacique, Sayhueque , last of the Mapuches to surrender to the Conquest of the Desert. After the defeat of the indigenous groups, permanent white settlement became a possibility. Modern Bariloche has its roots in the arrival of German settlers from southern Chile around the turn of the twentieth century, but was a small town of only a few thousand until the creation of the national park in 1937. Since then, in many ways, it has become a liability for the park, causing it numerous headaches such as forcing it to cede the area to the west to development. In recent decades, the population has sky-rocketed, and the town is now a major urban centre of some 100,000. Lack of planning restrictions has meant that the homogeneity of its original architecture - a local style heavily influenced by the mountain regions of Germanic Europe - has long since been swamped by a messy conglomerate of high-rise apartment blocks, a fact often bemoaned by its long-term residents Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Argentina,
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