Walk through one of the most seismic cities in the world: Valdivia, Los Ríos Region.
We offer a guided tour through the center of Valdivia, where a geologist will tell us details about the great earthquake of 1960.
In May 1960, a large earthquake hit several cities in Chile, including Valdivia (9.5 on the moment magnitude scale), the most powerful recorded instrumentally in the history of mankind. Survivors’ stories and the extensive photographic records of the time attest to the catastrophic event. As if this were not enough, there was a tsunami that caused the sea to flood, at least three times, the coastal sector of the Commune of Corral, destroying everything and claiming numerous human lives.
On the other hand, in the headwaters of the San Pedro River, which reaches the outskirts of Valdivia, occurred what in geological terms is known as “multirotational slidings”, in little consolidated Quaternary sediment, on the north margin of the valley. In other words, there was three landslides that generated a large escarpment. They mobilized in an instant tens of millions of m3 of sediment to form a dam of the Riñihue lake, where the San Pedro river is born. . Over two months around 3000 millions m3 of water were accumulated. The human epic that prevented the overflow and subsequent avalanche of this gigantic amount of water, which would have swept populations as far as Valdivia, is partly reported in the documentary “The Response”, by director Leopoldo Casado.
Finally, it should be noted that this seismic event and its consequences (i.e.landslide in the river valley) has a precedent centuries ago, when on December 28, 1575, a certain Pedro Feyjó addressed a letter to Mr. M. Calderón , recounting the seismic event in Valdivia: “… it was such that no house, church or monastery remained standing …”.
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