There are three specialized industries in this part of South America that deserve particular mention: the trade in fire- wood, the gathering of algarrobilla, and chinchilla hunting.
A Local Trade in Firewood
All of the principal valleys about Copiapó and Vallenar have been settled for a long time, in fact since the Conquest; and the natural, or wild, growth of wood has been gathered up and down the valley and for some distance out into the desert, just as about the mines and settlements of Bolivia and Peru llareta (moss) and tola bushes are gathered at greater and greater distances with the increase of population and the rise of modern industry.
In Copiapó and Vallenar the mines have brought increasing populations, and the point has been reached where the valleys do not supply all the necessities. A growing quantity of foodstuffs and other essentials are being imported, and among them is wood. It is said that Vallenar was built originally of wood cut in the lower Huasco valley and that Copiapó once stood in the midst of a rather dense stand of wood, taking in 1744 the name San Francisco de la Selva. The rapid cutting and burning of the natural growth took place about one hun- dred years ago. It is traditional that the province of Atacama had a widely extended woodland dependent in some places up- on ground water, once standing at a higher level than today, in other places upon the coastal fog and more frequent though scanty showers that fall in the coastal belt, as about the bay of Coquimbo and southward.[1] The present commercial supply of wood at Copiapó comes from a wild growth of shrubs forty miles south of Vallenar in the Huasco valley. With the open- ing of the railway in the past decade it became possible to gather and market wild stands that were formerly considered commercially inaccessible. The best stands of wood are found in that portion of the Huasco valley which is naturally sub- irrigated and yet which does not tempt agriculture. Thirty
- ↑ Walter Knoche: Uber die nérdliche Waldgrenze in Chile, Zeitschr. Gesell. fiir Erdkunde su Berlin, 1923, pp. 41-45.
