Puerto Montt

The site, covered in thick forest, was called Melipulli, "four hills" in Mapudungun. The colonial government chose it as an entrance to Lake Llanquihue once its closeness to the open sea was known. The naturalist Bernardo Philippi was put in charge of the settlement but died in 1851, and Vicente Pérez Rosales took over, bringing woodsmen from the islands of the sound to clear and burn the forest. The city was founded on 12 February 1853, after German immigration that began in 1848, and named after President Manuel Montt, who had set that immigration in motion.

Larch timber was the first business, alongside distilleries, breweries and the trade in goods from Germany and Valparaíso. The railway from Santiago arrived in 1912, making the city a point of entry to Chilean Patagonia, and the port opened in 1934. By 1950 the city had 27,500 people. The 1960 Valdivia earthquake then destroyed much of it, bringing down the port, the railway station and many buildings and houses. In March 1969 a police operation ordered by the Interior Ministry against landless families occupying unused farmland left ten people dead, an event remembered in Víctor Jara's song Preguntas por Puerto Montt.

In the 1970s Puerto Montt became capital of the Los Lagos Region. From the late 1980s the salmon farming industry brought accelerated growth in population and business, until a crisis in salmon aquaculture in the late 2000s caused severe unemployment. Passenger trains returned in 2025 on a local line.

Puerto Montt's culture mixes Chilean Spanish traditions with the German heritage of its founders, still visible in its German school, its old family names and the honorary consulates of Germany and other European countries. It has also long been a Mapuche city — its original name is Mapudungun — and in recent decades it has drawn many newcomers from across Chile looking for work.

Angelmó has a special place in the city's imagination. The painter Arturo Pacheco Altamirano, who arrived in 1926, made the fishing cove famous across Chile through his work, and in 1956 the Grupo Plástico Angelmó brought together a circle of local painters. The folk group Bordemar and the film-maker Raúl Ruiz are among the city's best-known natives.

As a regional capital and a university city, with campuses of the University of Los Lagos, the Austral University and private universities, Puerto Montt has a regional library, an arts centre and a cultural calendar that serves the whole of northern Patagonia. Its port makes it a city of arrivals and departures, the gateway to Chiloé, the fjords and Western Patagonia.

The commune had about 246,000 inhabitants at the 2017 census, the great majority of them in the city, after rapid growth since the 1980s; it has grown well beyond its historic centre over the surrounding hills. As capital of Los Lagos and of Llanquihue Province, it is the principal commercial, service and financial hub of northern Patagonia.

The economy rests on the port and on the salmon industry, with hatcheries, fisheries and packing plants mostly to the south of the city; fresh salmon is flown out daily to world markets. Agriculture, cattle and forestry on the surrounding land and islands, and tourism, add to it. The salmon crisis of the late 2000s showed how much the city depends on a single industry.

Daily life follows the rhythm of a busy regional centre: shopping centres along the waterfront, colectivos climbing the hills, boats crossing to Tenglo and the islands, and the constant traffic of buses and ferries heading for Chiloé and the south. Rain falls through much of the year, and summer brings the travellers passing through on their way to Patagonia.

Seafood is the city's food. Angelmó, the fishing cove beyond the bus terminal, is where most visitors eat it: market stalls sell fresh fish and shellfish, and the restaurants beside them serve seafood dishes. Salmon, the city's great industry, is the region's best-known export.

The cooking of the south is here too. Curanto, the Chiloé feast of shellfish, meat, sausage and potato dumplings cooked over hot stones, and milcao, a potato pancake, come from the island across the channel, while the Chilean staples — empanadas, cazuela and pastel de choclo — are everywhere. The German settlers of the surrounding lake country brought kuchen, a cake filled with seasonal fruit.

Small producers sell chocolates, fruit jams, liqueurs and biscuits at stalls in Angelmó and on the waterfront, and the city's cafés, restaurants and bars cluster in the centre. Breweries and distilleries were among Puerto Montt's first businesses in the 19th century, and chicha de manzana, a fermented apple cider, is one of the drinks of southern Chile.