… I’m returning
home, in my dreams,
I’m returning to Patagonia where
wind pounds the stables
and the Ocean spatters ice…
                               Pablo Neruda

Is Chile really a “faraway and foreign” country to us? It is and it isn’t, when we think about the tens of thousands of our people from the Croatian littoral and Dalmatia who immigrated to Chile. The first of them settled around 1850 in the town of Antofagasta and there they made their living from fishing and seamanship, just like in the old country.