Valdivia Chat

Plenty of people know Valdivia from the years they lived there: it is a university town most of the year — the Universidad Austral de Chile is based here — and fills with visitors in summer. #valdivia is its new room on ChatZona, for the capital of the Los Ríos region.

Nobody is in #valdivia yet, so joining from this page also puts you in #chile, the national room, which has people online day and night. If you run into someone from Valdivia there, you can move over to the city room.

The city grew where the Calle-Calle, Valdivia, Cau Cau and Cruces rivers meet. On 22 May 1960 it was hit by the strongest earthquake in modern records, magnitude 9.5; the sunken ground left wetlands inside the city, and in 2025 the Ramsar Convention accredited it as a Wetland City — the first in Chile and, together with Trelew in Argentina, among the first in Latin America.

German settler Carlos Anwandter founded his brewery on Isla Teja in 1851, hence the “beer capital of Chile” nickname, and the city is also home to the Valdivia International Film Festival, the Noche Valdiviana and the old forts around the bay at Corral and Niebla. Mainland Chile runs on UTC−4 in winter and UTC−3 in summer; nearby rooms include Osorno and Puerto Montt.