In the morning of 27 February 2010, after my return from a trip of 800 kilometres along the Chilean coast, Pichilemu (lat. 33) and Valdivia (lat. 38) woke up in the middle of the second strongest earthquake registered so far in the history of Chile (8.8 on the scale of Richter).

At dawn I left the city and I was surprised at how little destroyed it was. I felt a great relief, but after a couple of hours, contradictory news slowly began to appear saying that the coast had been devastated by a series of successive waves (the same coast that I had just visited).