Chilean Food History

Historical period

Coastal and Andean peoples with distinct food systems; Inca expansion to roughly the Maule; Spanish arrival in 1541 and the long Mapuche resistance that held the frontier at the Biobío for three centuries; wheat, cattle, vines and the colonial hacienda; independence from 1810; the wheat boom supplying California and Australia in the gold rushes; the nitrate economy of the north and its company towns; German, Croatian and Palestinian settlement; the Occupation of the Araucanía; twentieth-century urbanisation; and the fruit, wine and salmon export economy since the 1980s.