of Argentina. There he laid the foundations of agriculture on a satisfactory basis. The grateful citizens testified “he has spent and spends many pesos of gold in the provisioning of this land, for he has a good property in the ‘valle de Copayapo’ from whence he has provided and provides all the necessities for the sustenance of this city.”[1]
At first the grants of land in the Copiapó valley were quite vague. Some titles gave the owners rights that extended from the sea to the cordillera or from one quebrada to another. So great was the resulting confusion that the Audiencia Real or- ganized a commission charged with the duty of straightening out land titles where claims conflicted and of fixing the limits. In 1712 the commission gathered together all the titles it could find, and various miscellaneous papers as well, and set definite limits to the adjacent grants.[2]
The Situation of Copiapó
The geographical situation of Copiapó has given it some great natural advantages. It is in a region of increasing rain- fall southward, though the annual precipitation is still ex- tremely small. As we have already pointed out (pp. 47-48) this change is coincident with a topographic change. Instead of flat-floored basins rimmed by gently-sloping alluvium that appears to be flat in a distant view, we have here a broken or accidented country that lies at a higher elevation above the sea and is drained by a series of wide-branching tributaries taking their rise in lofty mountains (snow-covered most of the year) in the main chain of the Cordillera of the Andes. The trails naturally follow the watercourses to a great degree, and the convergence of the wide-spreading branches of the Copiapó River in the cordillera tends also to converge the trails upon the valley at Copiap6ó.
Located in this wise, the town attracts trade along the main north-south valley, which is developed as a true valley and not as a string of basins in the manner of the drainage basins of the
