Day 8

Inside the box

Today is bank holiday in Chile, to celebrate the lives of San Pablo and San Pedro. As such, the house stays asleep until late in the morning. We decide to go out and make the most of the sun, which we have not seen a lot of lately.

After a short ride on 'la micro', we arrive at the bottom of Cerro Ñielol, a hill that borders the city of Temuco. The hike up takes about 40 minutes. Along the way, we stop in viewpoints, where we get incredible views of the city from above.

Our host Jacqueline stressed the importance of the Cerro Ñielol for the Mapuche community. In pre-hispanic Chile, the Mapuche used the area due to its fertile land. On the hill they grew crops, and collected wood to build their homes and heat them. The place is also of particular religious importance for the Mapuche, and it was used for a very long time as a place of worship. In Mapuche cosmology, the main deities and spirits can be divided into different categories. There are the Pillan and the Wangulen, which are the ancestral spirits, the Wekufe, which are the evil spirits, and the Ngen, which are the spirits present in nature. The Ngen are thought to be particularly present in the area around the Cerro, which is one of the reasons why the Mapuche carried out religious ceremonies there. At the very top of the Cerro we discovered huge wooden statues made by Mapuche communities, and which provided proof for the occurrence of such ceremonies.

According to the Mapuche, the Cerro is also a place filled with Newen, a Mapuche word for 'force' or 'energy'. Saturday, during the We Tripantu ceremony, many Mapuche men and women claimed that they were not affected by the cold, the rain and the wind which were present all day long because celebrating the renewal of nature filled them with Newen, an internal fire.