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Puerto Montt is a port city in southern Chile at the northern end of the Reloncaví Sound, far south of Santiago, and the capital of the Los Lagos Region. The commune had 245,902 people in 2017 and is the gateway to the Chiloé Archipelago, the lakes district and Western Patagonia.
The city was founded on 12 February 1853 after government-sponsored immigration from Germany began to settle the region, and it was named after Manuel Montt, President of Chile from 1851 to 1861. Its culture still mixes Chilean and Spanish traditions with a German heritage, and it soon outgrew the older towns around it.
From the late 1980s Puerto Montt grew fast as the hub of the Chilean salmon industry, one of the largest in the world. Visitors come for the seafood market and crafts of Angelmó, the views over the sound, and the national parks, fjords and road that lead south into Patagonia.
Puerto Montt Cathedral faces the Plaza de Armas on land that founder Vicente Pérez Rosales set aside for a church. Blessed as a parish church in 1892 and made a cathedral in 1939, it has a front of four Doric columns recalling the Parthenon and rests on 12 columns of alerce wood.
The Plaza de Armas is the main square and heart of Puerto Montt, just one block from the Reloncaví Sound and the northern starting point of the Carretera Austral. It has a small bandstand for concerts and a bust of Buenaventura Martínez, who brought the first German settlers to the area.
The Jesuit Bell Tower rises among tall trees on the hill of the former San Francisco Javier school in the centre of Puerto Montt. Built in 1893 near the Jesuit church of 1872, it was declared a national monument in 1997 and usually opens to the public once a year on Cultural Heritage Day.
Sentados frente al mar, also called the Statue of the Lovers, is a six-metre sculpture by Robinson Barría of a couple embracing as they look over the Reloncaví Sound. Inspired by the song Puerto Montt by Los Iracundos, it opened on 14 February 2002 and became a landmark despite criticism.
Angelmó is a small bay of Puerto Montt facing Tenglo Island that grew up as a port at the end of the 19th century. Today it is a hub of tourist attractions, with a crafts fair, houses on stilts, a market of fish and shellfish, and a port for boats heading south to Chiloé and Patagonia.
Tenglo Island lies just across the Tenglo Channel from Puerto Montt and is the northernmost island of the Reloncaví Sound, home to about 1,078 people. At its northeastern tip, Puntilla Tenglo has a viewpoint with a sanctuary and a large white cross looking over the city and the bay.
Pelluco is a seaside resort 4 kilometres east of Puerto Montt on the road towards the Carretera Austral. As the city has no large beaches, Pelluco is its favourite place to swim in summer, with cabins and restaurants facing a sheltered shore where the beach grows wide at low tide.
The Reloncaví Sound is a wide arm of the Pacific at whose northern end Puerto Montt was founded, about 24 nautical miles from north to south and 17 from east to west. It marks the end of the Central Valley of Chile and is often seen as the geographic beginning of Chilean Patagonia.
The Reloncaví Estuary is a narrow arm of the sea about 30 kilometres long at the eastern end of the Reloncaví Sound. Lying in the communes of Puerto Varas and Cochamó, it receives the waters of the Petrohué, Cochamó, Puelo and Blanco rivers and of the Canutillar power station.
Alerce Andino National Park lies about 46 kilometres from Puerto Montt and is part of a UNESCO biosphere reserve of temperate rainforest. Its alerce trees grow taller than 40 metres across some 20,000 hectares, among more than fifty lakes and pools where pumas and the tiny pudú deer live.
Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park, created in August 1926, is the oldest national park in Chile and covers 253,780 hectares of the Andes. Its western entrance near Ensenada is 82 kilometres northeast of Puerto Montt, and it protects Lake Todos los Santos and the source of the Petrohué River.
The Carretera Austral begins at Puerto Montt and runs south for about 1,240 kilometres to Villa O'Higgins through rural Patagonia, with its final section opened in 2000. Its first ferry crossing lies about 45 kilometres from the city, and long stretches of the road remain unpaved.
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Log in to add photosPhoto: Jörg Sancho Pernas, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
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