The Araucan Curanto
Photos: Rubén Escalante
Text: Graciela Francucci
The Curanto Tradition
When we arrived in Colonia Suiza, we found a history of movements, changes,
of belonging and not belonging, with the history of a man searching for a place
to settle and build his dreams. It is as if between one culture and the other
you converge into the Araucan curanto made by the Goyes, descendants of settlers
that came from Valais, in French Switzerland. They came and adopted local traditions. This
tradition was introduced by the aborigines that initially came from southern Chile.
May be its origin is Polynesian. It is a ceremony where the food is cooked
with the heat from round stones, placed in a hole in the ground. The stones are
previously heated with logs, then maqui or nalca leaves (local bushes) are spread
over the stones, meats and vegetables are placed on top, everything is covered
with the same leaves, wet fabrics and the hole is covered with the soil.
The flavor of this type of cooking is slightly smoked, you have to try it... The
Swiss immigrants settled in this area of the Andean Range, a few km. from where
Bariloche stands today, at the end of the last century. They were farmers
and gave a good impulse to the region. Most of them came to Chile and then crossed
the Andes. Very few arrived from Buenos Aires, one of them was Eduardo Goye, father
of Emilio Goye, pioneer of the commercial curanto. All of them with immigrants
of different origin like Germans from Chile, and mapuches that remained after
the exterminating campaign by General Roca (1879), composed the population of
this region at the beginning of the century. The aborigines that populated
and populate this land were the keepers of the curanto; it is their symbol: the
prosperous harvest, the earth opening and delivering its fruits and the gratitude.
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