Frutillar

Frutillar Bajo runs along the shore of Lake Llanquihue with Osorno directly across the water, and it is the most carefully kept of the German colonist towns - timber houses, gardens, and a German colonial museum with reconstructed farm buildings and a working water mill. Since 2010 it has also had the Teatro del Lago, a concert hall built out over the lake in timber and copper with a main auditorium seating around a thousand and acoustics designed for orchestral work, which was an unlikely thing to build in a town of a few thousand people and has become the base of a long-running summer music festival.

History

Bernhard Eunom Philippi saw Lake Llanquihue in 1842 and proposed bringing German settlers to the south of Chile, and Vicente Pérez Rosales, named head of the German colonisation of Llanquihue, steered the new colonists to the lake; they landed at Puerto Montt and travelled overland and by boat to its shores. Frutillar was founded by German settlers in 1856, its name comes from the Chilean white strawberry, frutilla, and in 2017 it became the first Chilean city in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, as a City of Music (Wikipedia, Frutillar).

Highlights

• Colonist timber houses and gardens - along the lake shore.
• A museum with a working mill - the German colonial collection.
• The Teatro del Lago - a concert hall built out over the water.
• Osorno across the lake - directly opposite the front.

When to go

December to February; late January for the music festival. A full day.

Good to know

Concert tickets sell out for the festival and accommodation with it. The town is small and quiet outside summer, with much of it closed. Rain is frequent. The volcano view depends entirely on cloud.

Nearby

Puerto Varas is south round the lake; Puerto Octay is north.

Key facts