Abstract

e Region of Arica and Parinacota is a space of diverse environments that include coasts, valleys, foothills and high plateaus. In each of these landscapes, the interaction between the environment and man has been manifested through diverse cultural expressions that have been traced in the surroundings. is generates sites with natural and unique wealth that are necessary to value and conserve through the Regional Performance Agreement – UTA 1401: MODEL OF STRATEGIC TERRITORIAL ARTICULATION: STRENGTHENING THE CAPACITIES OF MANAGEMENT AND THE RETENTION OF THE HUMAN CAPITAL OF THE REGION FROM ARICA AND PARINACOTA IN A BIDIRECTIONAL UNIVERSITY-REGIONAL COMMUNITY RELATIONSHIP. Speci cally, the Natural Heritage Node empowers the community, leaving real traces of its local heritage, such as the book “Azapa Olives.” Since the last decades of the sixteenth century, the olive tree was the center of Hispanic agricultural activity in Azapa Valley. e olives and the oil motivated the creation of mills and an active commercial tra c. e Spanish tradition, however, was intertwined with Andean traditions. e introduction of the biblical olive tree in Chile is an unholy story. e mestizo Inca chronicler, Garcilaso de la Vega, in his true comments on the Incas, devotes a chapter to the story of the olive tree that was taken to Peru and then to Chile. It locates the facts in 1560, around thirty years a er the beginning of the conquest of Tawantinsuyo or the Empire of the Incas. e very same year of one thousand ve hundred and sixty, Don Antonio de Ribera, a neighbor of the Kings [Lima], had gone years before to Spain as an Attorney General of Peru and returned with olive plants from Seville. Plants that with much care and diligence, he put in two large clay vessels, with more than a hundred trunks, but did not reach the City of the Kings with more than three saplings alive. ese were put in a beautiful fenced property that he had in the valley, along with fruits like grapes, gs, pomegranates, melons, oranges, limes and other fruits and vegetables from Spain. ese vegetables and fruits were sold in the Plaza of the city as new fruit, making a large amount of money because certain items cost over two hundred thousand pesos, which is believed to be the truth. In this place, Don Antonio de Ribera planted the olive trees, and no one else could have not even a leaf of them to plant in another place; he put a great army that had more than a hundred black people and thirty dogs, that day and night would watch over their new and precious trunks. It happened that someone stole one of the three plants that night, it is suspected someone who was watching the dogs or one of the black people who was harvesting did it. Few days later, the olive sapling awoke in Chile, near six hundred leagues from the City of the Kings, where was spent three years raising samplings in such a prosperous kingdom. At the time people planted new olive trees, some of them thin, that did not catch at rst and that in a very short time did not make very beautiful olives according to the stories of the renowned historian Dr. Jorge Hidalgo L. e history of the olive tree in the Azapa Valley is part of the history of the rst Spanish settlers who founded the city and port of Arica. e agriculture of the coastal valleys and the trade with Argentinean cities o ered to those colonists the permanent economic activity that would give its character to this sector south of the Andes.