Vicuña

The Elqui Valley was home long before the Spanish to peoples of the Molle and Diaguita cultures, later drawn into the Inca sphere. In the colonial period the valley was divided into large agricultural estates, where grape-based distillation began. Vicuña itself is a creation of independent Chile: it was founded on 22 February 1821 by Colonel Joaquín Vicuña Larraín, the first intendant of Coquimbo Province, on the orders of Bernardo O'Higgins, to secure the country's hold on the valley. He named it Villa de San Isidro de Vicuña, and in 1872 the name was shortened to honour him.

The town grew into the principal town of the Elqui Valley, and much of its centre dates from around 1900; the parish church was inaugurated in 1909. Here in 1889 Lucila Godoy Alcayaga was born. As Gabriela Mistral she became the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945, and the National Prize for Literature followed in 1951. The house where she spent her first years became the town's museum, and in 2009, on the 120th anniversary of her birth, it received original manuscripts that had been kept in the United States.

In the 20th century pisco and the sky shaped the valley. In 1936 the village of La Unión upstream was renamed Pisco Elqui to press Chile's claim to the drink, and Vicuña became a major centre of pisco production, home to the Capel cooperative's main plant. From the 1960s international observatories were built on the surrounding mountains, and the municipal Mamalluca observatory opened the night sky to visitors.

Vicuña's identity rests on three things: Gabriela Mistral, pisco and the stars. The poet is everywhere — sculptures and motifs on the main square, her name on streets and on the museum built around her childhood home, and the baptismal font where she was christened in the parish church. Her poems of the valley's landscape and childhood helped make the Elqui a place of particular meaning in Chile.

Pisco is a matter of local and national pride. Chile protects the drink with a designation of origin covering the Atacama and Coquimbo regions, and the rivalry with Peru over who owns it is taken seriously. The Capel cooperative, Chile's main pisco producer, has its production and bottling plant in the commune, and smaller distilleries nearby offer tastings of their own.

Astronomy is a more recent part of local life. With about 300 clear nights a year, the area hosts research telescopes such as Cerro Tololo and the tourist observatory of Mamalluca, which gave its name to a 1999 album by the Chilean band Los Jaivas. The summer belongs to the Carnaval Elquino, held for more than a century, in which the valley's villages compete with dances, the election of a queen and a great parade of floats in January and February.

The 2017 census counted 27,771 people in the commune of Vicuña, of whom about 17,000 lived in the town and the rest in rural areas. The commune is the largest in the Coquimbo Region and the second-largest in Chile by area, covering most of the middle and upper Elqui basin and running east to the Argentine border through mountains over 4,000 metres high.

Farming is the base of the economy: grapes for pisco on the flat valley floor, along with other fruits, cereals and vegetables, and sheep ranching, with some iron and copper mining in the hills. Pisco making and bottling are the leading industries, and tourism has grown quickly on the strength of the valley's hotels, restaurants, distilleries and observatories.

The town is quiet for much of the year and busiest in the summer holidays, when the carnival and visitors fill the square. Water is the constant worry, as a long drought across the region has shrunk reservoirs and squeezed farmers.

Vicuña's signature is pisco, the grape brandy distilled from muscat and other aromatic grapes grown on the valley floor. It is drunk as a pisco sour, in Chile made with lime juice and sugar, as a piscola with cola, or neat, and the distilleries around town sell their own bottlings, from large commercial brands to small artisan producers.

The valley's fruit fills the rest of the table. The small, fragrant Chilean papaya grown in the Elqui is sold preserved in syrup and as juice and sweets, alongside raisins and dried peaches, and goat's cheese from the dry hills of the region is eaten fresh or aged. Kid goat, cabrito, is roasted for festivals.

Everyday food is the Chilean country repertoire: empanadas de pino, filled with minced beef, onion, egg and olive; cazuela, a clear stew with meat, potato and pumpkin; and pastel de choclo, a baked pie of sweet ground corn over a meat filling, served in the restaurants around the square.