The Laja Canal diverts water from the river of this name, has a main length of 25 miles with distribution canals of 240 miles, and is lined with concrete for ten miles of its course where sandy soil is traversed. It is calculated that this canal serves 110,000 acres of land. The Melado Canal, drawing water from the river of the same name, is fifteen miles long, and irrigates 75,000 acres.
The Public Works Department also plans construction of canals drawing water from the Culenar River, to irrigate 12,000 acres; from the Nilahue, to irrigate 25,000 acres; and from the Colina, to irrigate 10,000 acres, while businesslike schemes for damming and utilising the water of seven of Chile’s string of snow-fed mountain lakes in the south are also under way. All this work is due for completion by 1925, while studies of the strange rivers of the north that flow from the Andes and bury themselves in the sandy deserts long before the sea is approached have also been energetically carried on, with a view to salving these much-needed waters. Don Carlos Hoerning, Chief Engineer of the Chilean Reclamation service, says that the wonderful northern climate and soil respond to irrigation by producing crops five times as abundant as the normal rate in the south, justifying the expense of pumping and piping water.
Formerly, private enterprise was interested in irrigation canals only in the central farming regions, while the more generously watered south ignored the question; but denudation of the southern forests has brought about a change in this rainy region while the need for foodstuffs and the excellent rewards awaiting the farmer have valorised every acre of good soil, and today a large proportion of the canalisation projects of the Government refer to southerly regions. With little public land to offer, the Chilean Government’s new laws were drafted to reach the owner of large areas of uncultivated—and, if without water, uncultivable—land. When the newly inaugurated system is in full working order Chile should have at least 100,000,000 acres under the plough.
CHAPTER IX
FOREST AND WOODLAND
Extent.—Beech, Conifer and Bamboo.—Trees in Northern and Central Chile.—Plantations.
Chile’s heavily wooded country lies in the rainy south, and stretches from the stormy islands about Cape Horn through the long archipelagos and the provinces of Llanquihue and Valdivia, the forests gradually thinning out as they run northward through the old Araucanian country. The province of Cautín is the last stronghold of deep forest.
Altogether, the tree-covered area of Chile is estimated at 15,000,000 hectares, or about 37,000,000 acres; but at least two-thirds of this quantity must be left out of consideration as regards opportunity for organized commercial effort such as paper-pulp making. Lack of large “social” woods, and thin or patchy distribution, is of course a bar to industrial effort on a great scale, but there are immense stretches existing in certain regions, as in Valdivia, with nearly 2,000,000 acres of continuous forest; Llanquihue, with 1,500,000 acres; and Chiloé, with rather more than 1,000,000 acres.
An impressive picture is created by the density and extent of the southern forests of Chile, among the last of the great primeval tree-covered areas in the world. They are like immense green seas, filling mile after mile of basin-like valleys, running up the sides of the lower Andean spurs, and in the archipelagos often closing down to the sea’s edge so thickly that waves break between the trunks. Up to the present the trees which have proved most useful are conifers, as the alerce, used for centuries by the native Indians for their canoes; the “Chilean pine” (Araucaria chilensis), yielding a big cone-full of kernels not unlike chestnuts, which must not be confounded with its kin, Araucaria imbricata, the “Monkey-puzzle” tree; the tall lumo of Chiloé, used for shipbuilding, and exported to Liverpool before the war; and two varieties of the native “roble,” which are not oaks, as this colloquial Spanish name suggests, but varieties of beech.
The evergreen beech (Fagus antarcticus) flourishes in Magellanic territory, and with its kin the deciduous Fagus betuloides and the cypress (Libocedrus Tetragonus) stands along the borders of Magellan Strait and on the glacier country of the deeply scored waterways extending northwards; its habitat does not extend north beyond the Chonos Islands, or about 45° of south latitude. All about Punta Arenas this beech is of great service, is used for house construction and boatbuilding, and still exists in large stretches of woodland. The famous Winter’s Bark (Drimys Winterii), a beautiful tree whose aromatic-scented bark was noted by the earliest travellers, is also used locally. Many of the shouldering green heights that edge the Strait are clothed almost to the summit with trees that, changing to burning yellow and orange tints by the month of April, glow from the mists, their lower trunks thick with ferns.
Two wild bamboos of South Chile are common—the small climbing “quila,” and the “colihue,” sometimes growing thirty feet tall, and congregated in great social tracts known as “colihuales.” Characteristic woodland of the Valdivia region is tangled with these bamboos, with thick ferns, and with such creepers as the lovely Lapageria rosea, with its waxen pink or white flowers that retain the Indian name of copihue—the national flower of Chile, and the no less beautiful Philesia.