Santa Cruz

Before the Spanish arrived, the Colchagua valley was home to Picunche farmers, people of Mapudungun speech whom the Inca called Promaucaes because they had never been brought under the empire. There seems to have been an Indigenous village called Unco where the town now stands. After the conquest, Pedro de Valdivia granted the lands of Colchagua, with their 1,500 inhabitants, in encomienda to Inés Suárez in 1544, and by 1659 a hacienda called Santa Cruz de Unco appears in the will of its owner, Francisco Donoso Pajuelo.

The town was never formally founded. At some unrecorded date in colonial times a wooden cross was raised where the roads to the coast met, as a place of shelter and rest for travellers, and houses and shops gradually grew up along the roads leading out from it. That is why Santa Cruz has a street-shaped plan rather than a chessboard grid. The village took its name from its province: Santa Cruz de Colchagua after 1826, Santa Cruz de Curicó after 1865. The commune was created on 22 December 1891, and in 1904 the town became the head of a department of its own. Landowning families such as the Errázuriz and the Eguiguren dominated local life well into the 20th century.

The earthquake of 27 February 2010 struck the town hard; the Colchagua Museum lost about 60 per cent of its collections to damage and stayed closed for eight months. Over the last two decades rural and wine tourism has become a major source of income.

Santa Cruz sees itself as a place where the traditions of the Chilean countryside live on, in its wine, its food and in rodeo, the national sport of the huasos, the horsemen of the central estates. The valley's horsemen ride in short jackets, flat-brimmed hats and woven chamantos, and rodeo arenas and fondas are part of every big holiday. In the 1960s the town's spring festival, the Fiesta de la Primavera, became widely known.

Wine now shapes the town's identity. On the first weekend of March the Fiesta de la Vendimia fills the Plaza de Armas with stalls of food, crafts and wine from the main estates; harvest queens are chosen, and thousands of visitors come for the weekend.

The Colchagua Museum, opened in 1995 by Carlos Cardoen, a businessman born in the town, is a large private museum run by his foundation, with pre-Columbian, colonial and independence collections, vintage cars, a locomotive, and a hall on the rescue of the 33 miners at the San José mine in 2010. A steam-hauled wine train once ran on the old branch line between San Fernando and Paniahue, but it no longer runs.

About 41,500 people lived in the commune according to a 2021 estimate by the National Statistics Institute, around 60 per cent of them in the town and the rest in villages such as Isla de Yáquil, Paniahue and Villa Alegre. The town sits at about 155 metres above sea level on the plains of the Tinguiririca and Chimbarongo rivers.

Farming has always been the base of the economy — wheat, tomatoes and wine were the town's first products, and maize and wine-making are its strongest sectors today. The grape harvest from late summer into autumn brings seasonal workers into the vineyards and cellars, and the wineries, the museum, the casino and hotels employ many more. Tourism has grown steadily since the wine route was organised, and visitors from Santiago and abroad are part of everyday life on the plaza.

Life keeps the rhythm of a country town: a long lunch, a quiet afternoon and an evening on the square. Yamil Ethit is the mayor.

Colchagua cooking is the country kitchen of central Chile. Summer brings pastel de choclo, a pie of sweet ground corn over a meat filling; humitas, sweetcorn paste steamed in corn husks; and porotos granados, fresh beans stewed with corn and squash. They are served with pebre or chancho en piedra, a tomato and chilli salsa ground in a stone mortar. Empanadas de pino and grilled meat on Sundays and holidays complete the picture, and mote con huesillo, a cold drink of dried peaches in syrup with husked wheat, is sold at roadside stands in summer.

Wine is the great local product. Colchagua is best known for full-bodied red wines — Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère and Syrah — and the Apalta slopes north-east of town produce some of the country's most celebrated bottles. Pipeño, a young, rustic wine traditionally made from the País grape, remains the everyday drink of the countryside.

Many wineries serve long lunches with their own wines, and the harvest festival in March fills the plaza with food stalls offering country dishes, empanadas and the valley's wines.