Porvenir wasn’t born of gold

People like to say Porvenir was born of the gold rush. That’s half true, and the missing half is the one that matters most.

The gold of the Baquedano range

Newcomers began settling the island in the 1880s, drawn by the gold of the Baquedano range (cordón Baquedano) and the first grazing concessions. By around 1883 there was already a police post because of the mining, and gold came to be worked on an industrial scale: Memoria Chilena holds records of a dredge on the Río Oro in 1906 and of another left abandoned in the Baquedano range in 1923.

That first stage, which faded in the early twentieth century, was followed by a longer, quieter one: Croatian and Chilote miners panning for gold by hand in the Fuegian mountains for much of the century.

A town for the estancias

Porvenir was founded in 1894, not as a mining camp but as a service town for the sheep estancias (large ranches) then taking hold on the island.

The scale of those estancias explains the rest. In 1890 the government granted a million hectares of Tierra del Fuego to José Nogueira, and after his death in 1893 Sara Braun and Mauricio Braun formed the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, which established the Caleta Josefina, San Sebastián and Cameron estancias.

The ones who came

By around 1914 some two thousand Croatians lived in Magallanes, close to 30% of the foreign-born and 10% of the population, settled mostly in Punta Arenas and Porvenir and working in trade, the crafts and the hotel business. They came from the Dalmatian coast and its islands, which at the time were not a country but part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first Croatian immigrants are buried in the Porvenir cemetery.

Later came the Chilotes, people from Chiloé, who stayed on to work the estancias and the small-scale gold diggings.

What the Selk’nam lost

The island was not empty. It had been Selk’nam territory for thousands of years, and for that people the arrival of the estancias was a catastrophe.

The report of the Comisión Verdad Histórica y Nuevo Trato (Historical Truth and New Deal Commission) describes it precisely. The Sociedad Explotadora occupied the heart of Selk’nam territory, brought in livestock, set up work camps and fenced the land, restricting the movement of its inhabitants, and “pushed a more aggressive practice against the Indigenous people.” The same report states that its staff and those of other estancias were directly responsible “at the very least, for the deaths of more than 300 Indigenous people.”

The sheep displaced the guanaco, the mainstay of their diet, and when the Selk’nam hunted sheep, repression followed. Added to that were the armed bands—Memoria Chilena holds an 1886 record of the gold prospector Julius Popper leading an attack on Selk’nam people—and the Salesian mission on Dawson Island, where many of those taken there died of diseases such as syphilis and tuberculosis.

The Selk’nam did not disappear. In 2023, Law 21,606 added them to the Indigenous peoples recognized by the Chilean state, and today there are people and organizations who identify as Selk’nam. To tell Porvenir’s story without them is to tell it wrong.

The museum

The Museo Municipal Fernando Cordero Rusque (Fernando Cordero Rusque Municipal Museum) is the best way into all of this. It is named for the Carabineros police lieutenant who, in the mid-1970s, began gathering the pieces local residents donated. It opened in 1980 and has rooms on the Selk’nam, the gold of the Baquedano range, sheep ranching and the founding of the town.

Its hours can change, so it’s best to confirm them before you go. The gold route is a separate outing: the Baquedano range lies outside town, out on the open steppe.