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the directional origin of the earthquake, wondered what would happen if an earthquake struck England—“the earthquake alone is sufficient to destroy the prosperity of a country,” he wrote—and delved briefly into earth science. He wrapped his musings up with a revealing comment about his own personality and the clash between his generally sympathetic nature and his lust for novelty—and geology. “It is a bitter & humiliating thing to see works which have cost men so much time & labour overthrown in one minute,” he concluded. “Yet compassion for the inhabitants is almost instantly forgotten by the interest excited in finding that state of things produced at a moment of time which one is accustomed to attribute to the succession of ages.”

Concepción, for the moment, is rebuilt. We expected to find sturdy, defensive-minded architecture, since major earthquakes had destroyed all or most of the city in 1570, 1657, 1835, and 1939. The largest recorded earthquake in human history, which struck offshore from Valdivia in 1960, caused by comparison only mild damage in Concepción. The subsequent tsunami, however—which also hit Japan, Hawaii, and the California coast—was devastating.

Josh and I arrived in the evening at a concrete bunker-style bus station in the middle of a rainstorm. We found a flea-ridden, dirty hovel on the edge of town and settled in for the night. Josh’s sagging bed cracked as he sat down. Within minutes of lying down, small welts began to appear on my arm and back, bringing to mind something Darwin had written about camping near Valdivia. “Our resting house was so dirty I preferred sleeping outside,” he wrote. “I am sure in the morning there was not the space of a shilling on my legs which had not its little red mark where the flea had feasted.”

Sometimes, in romanticizing Darwin’s trip as a wonderful adventure, I forgot that travel in the nineteenth century had certain blood-sucking disadvantages as well.

“I think something’s biting me,” I informed Josh.

He raised an eyebrow.

“Actually,” I continued, “I know something is biting me.”

We slept poorly. The hostel was full of laborers who woke up early to take breakfast and go to work. Someone started hammering something in the hallway outside our room at 7:15 A.M. I struggled out of bed and wandered down the hall. The bathroom was a miserable hole, with a rusting, dirty toilet and a shower that looked like something out of the better class of mystery novel. The shower had a huge crater in the middle of the tile, with a small metal grate not doing much to conceal it. There was a picture of a seahorse on the grate, though. I decided to skip the shower and trudged back to the room, where I flipped on the lights.

“I think they’re building an airplane out there,” Josh groaned.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” I said.

“I fully expect to walk out and see an assembled light craft in the hallway,” Josh said.

We switched hotels and found, to our surprise, that the rest of Concepción was not at all a miserable place. The University of Concepción, one of Chile’s finest, lent a good vibe to the city, small, high-character cafés stayed open late and proudly offered real coffee, and numerous clean, leafy plazas kept anything from feeling too industrial. The Plaza de Armas had a beautiful fountain in the middle and a nice, earthquake-safe cathedral on one end. The cathedral’s towers fell down in the 1939 earthquake (and earlier, in 1835, etcetera), and the citizenry evidently decided that they had watched their towers crumble enough times. So for now, no towers.

The 1835 quake, we discovered, was known as “La Ruina.” Concepción had suffered so many that each had been given a nickname.

We hiked over to ask the director of the regional history museum about earthquakes. It was starting to get a little bit old, going to museums in almost every town, but they were such useful little places, collections not just of local history but of local values, revealing so much about what the town prioritized. Stuffed birds and sheep shearing photos in Patagonia, a small display disparaging