On a misty afternoon in Chiloé, a pastoral island off the coast of Chilean Patagonia, chef María Luisa Maldonado tends to a smoking mound of earth. Steam rises from her backyard pit, carrying the scent of shellfish, pork, and milcao, a dumpling made of cooked potato mixed with raw grated potato. All of the ingredients have cooked slowly over the past hour in a subterranean oven, which is covered in fan-like nalca leaves and heated by hot stones. Now, it’s time for María Luisa and her daughter Carol to peel away the leaves and reveal our feast.
“Curanto was the first way of cooking here on Chiloé,” María Luisa explains. “And I think it’s marvelous that we still prepare it to this day.”
Curanto is, in fact, one of the oldest continuously practiced cooking techniques in the Americas, dating back at least 11,000 years. For visitors to this small agrotourism farm, the ceremony is both performance and preservation—a window into a cuisine rooted in centuries of Indigenous Huilliche culture.
At its heart are the potatoes—purple, pink, and gold—which have sustained Chiloé’s people, and defined their identity, for generations.
“For all of our history, the potato has been the principal element of the Chiloé diet,” María Luisa says as we dine together in her rustic wooden home. I’ve come here on a “foodie adventure” tour with Birds Chile, which operates out of the mainland resort town of Puerto Varas. The company offers access to chefs like María Luisa, who open their home kitchens for intimate culinary experiences you can’t find on TripAdvisor. Later, walking through her fields, the septuagenarian points out native varieties like the black-skinned michuñe negra, purple-skinned morada, and papa bruja (a tie-dyed indigo inside), which she uses to make breads, stews, and empanadas.
Local chefs like Maria Luisa Maldonado invite you into their homes to learn the ancient art of preparing potatoes.
Photo by Mark Johanson
It’s hard to imagine that the potato—so integral to diets everywhere from Ireland to Idaho to Irkutsk—is a relatively recent addition to global cuisine. It didn’t journey around the world until the 16th century, but Indigenous communities in Chile, Bolivia, and Peru have been cultivating the tuber for thousands of years. DNA studies show that the common spud, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the global stock, may have originated here, some 700 miles south of the Chilean capital Santiago, in Chiloé.
“We believe—and the genetic studies show—that most of the European and American varieties have Chilean ancestors,” explains Anita Behn, an agricultural sciences professor and potato specialist at the Universidad Austral de Chile. “If you look at the genetics of the Solanum tuberosum from Chiloé islands, it is very similar and clustered together with the common potato varieties you see today.”
The first spud itself wasn’t from Chile, though. Potatoes were domesticated between 8,000 and 5,000 B.C.E. in the Andean plateau of Peru and Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca. The root vegetable soon spread down the Andes to places like Chiloé, which has the greatest potato diversity beyond the Titicaca region. Chiloé has similar climate conditions to Northern Europe and North America (including extended daylight hours during the summer growing season), so these potatoes were likely better adapted for global adoption.
The people of the Chiloé Archipelago, the main Chiloé Island and 40 smaller islets, have historically cultivated more than 800 varieties of potatoes. Only 286 survived into the 21st century, including clavela lisa (a creamy pink variety) and cabra (which is both sweet and spicy). With the help of the U.N., NGOs, and young Chilean chefs, there’s a newfound pride in this native product. Chiloé has even emerged as something of a culinary hot spot, which Birds Chile is showcasing via its four-day food tour from Puerto Varas to Castro.
Potatoes and other foods are cooked undergound in a tradition called curanto.
Photo by Mark Johanson
I spend the first nights of my trip in the island capital Castro, sleeping in a traditional palafito stilt home transformed in 2023 into Bledford Chiloé. The boutique four-room hotel is, naturally, adorned with wicker-woven art installations in the shape of potatoes. The next day, I meet chef Mauricio Ayala, who hosts bountiful seven-course meals at Cazador, located in a restored Chilote cottage. The inspiration at Cazador is a traditional Sunday lunch with the family—which means shared plates, rustic recipes, and the kind of porcelain dinnerware you might find at a Chilean grandmother’s house.
In his 16 years of studying Chiloé potatoes, Ayala says he’s found around 20 varieties to be of high culinary value. “In general, they come not from flat fields but hilly ones that are ideally close to the sea,” he explains. “The older farmers, who have a strong connection to the traditions of permaculture, always enhanced the soil with seaweeds. So the best potatoes, in my opinion as a chef, have always come from these conditions.”
Seasonal dishes at Cazador include a stew of seaweeds and black garlic topped with purple potatoes, known as brujas, which have been smoked in baskets above fires over the course of three months. This ancient Chilote technique imparts a smokey flavor.
All across Castro, I find chefs not only rescuing traditional plates with native potatoes but also inventing new ones. The wine bar Don Martín, which opened in December 2024, pairs orange wines with purple gnocchi, as well as the crunchiest and most flavorful french fries I’ve ever had, cooked in duck fat with lengua de vaca potatoes.
Rucalaf, meanwhile, pairs smoked pork ribs marinated in apple chicha (a tangy Andean fruit beer) with roasted honey-glazed chapaleles (a potato dumpling that is a curanto staple, made with ground cooked potato kneaded with flour, butter, and pork rinds). Chef Lorna Muñoz of Travesía, author of an ethnographical Chiloé cookbook, even serves a cake-like dessert, mella de papa, with red-skinned michuñe rojo potatoes, which have remained in the soil from one harvest to the next, concentrating their sugars.
After exploring the culinary renaissance in Castro, I spend my final three nights in the more pastoral Rilan Peninsula at the architecturally striking Refugia Chiloe, a hotel covered in the island’s distinctive wooden shingles (made from giant alerce trees). This all-inclusive boutique has an organic garden with seven potato varieties, which it features in dishes like grilled octopus over a trilogy of papas nativas (deep fried, sautéed, and pureed).
The Refugia Chiloe hotel in Patagonia has a garden with seven potato varieties and spud cocktails.
Photo by Mark Johanson
“The food in Chiloé really highlights the work of the farmer,” says Refugia Chiloe’s head chef Francisco Castañeda. “It’s also a very sustainable gastronomy, when compared to the industrialization of food on the mainland.”
Bartenders at Refugia Chiloe mix cocktails such as one called Antu, which combines orange liqueur and lemon zest with earthy Sirena vodka—distilled from Chiloé potatoes. Even the Uma Spa here has a facial treatment that uses chuño flour made from a dehydrated potato, which is an ancestral practice for food conservation (there’s also a hot stone treatment inspired by the curanto).
I sign up for the included activities, such as a morning clam dig in the Pullao Wetland. One afternoon, I sail in the hotel’s boat out to Chelín, a satellite island rumored to have Chiloé’s finest potatoes. The next, I visit with Huilliche farmer Sandra Naiman, who reminds me that Indigenous communities like hers are the ones saving these spuds from disappearing.
“These are a relic of our ancestors who are not here anymore,” she says of the five native varieties in her garden, which are more susceptible to potato smut than industrialized crops. Many younger farmers, she adds, have stopped cultivating them.
Naiman tells me how potatoes are wrapped up in Chiloé’s traditional medicines and practices, used to treat everything from broken bones to frostbite or internal hemorrhaging. They’re also staple figures in the archipelago’s unique cosmovision (which features devious forest goblins, fish-herding mermaids, and phantom ships)—born out of centuries of isolation. “We absolutely need to save the native potatoes,” she explains. “Because if we lose the potatoes, we will lose our identity.”
