Of the 24 wetlands that once covered the territory of Afunalhue, in Chile, only eight remain today. This figure is the result of monitoring conducted in recent years by the Mapuche indigenous community, led by José Luis Caniulef, to understand what was happening to their territory and natural environment. “We’ve lost 16 estuaries—that’s almost two-thirds,” says Alexis Catalan Caniulef, a Mapuche leader, community president and director of a conservation project now working to reverse this loss. This figure accurately encapsulates a broader transformation: the degradation of an ecological and cultural system that, for generations, has sustained life in this part of southern Chile. 

The José Luis Caniulef Community is composed of over 80 Mapuche families and is located near Villarrica, in La Araucanía region—an area of temperate Andean forest famous for its great biodiversity and considered a global hotspot due to the number of endemic species it harbors. But this biological richness coexists with complex structural conditions. Data from the CASEN Survey, conducted by Chile’s Ministry of Social Development and Family, estimates that, in 2024, income poverty in the region reached 28.6%, making it the most impoverished one in the country.

The community-led project, supported by the International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI) and funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), through its Indigenous Peoples Assistance Facility (IPAF), focuses on the regeneration of Itrofil Mongen, a concept from the Mapuche worldview that is often translated as biodiversity, but implies something broader: the interdependence of all living beings, territory, and nature, without hierarchies between humans and the environment.

“Itrofil Mongen refers to all living things,” Alexis explains. “This includes the mountain, the rocks—things that, from an ecological perspective, are considered inanimate.” For the Mapuche people, it is not just about species that need protection, but about the relationships between forest and water, people and land, and ancestral and ecological practices—relationships that need to be restored.

Understanding how much these relationships had been severed was the first step for the Caniulef community. For at least five years, they worked on a participatory process that combined the use of scientific methodologies and local knowledge: water monitoring based on physical-chemical indicators and macroinvertebrates, forest characterization, and the use of monitoring cameras to identify wildlife. At the same time, they conducted collective mapping and organized traditional gatherings—called Trawün in the Mapudungun language—where they set aside space and time to reconstruct the territory’s recent history: changes in land ownership, forest fires, and pollution cases that they poured into a documentary.

This convergence allowed them to identify specific patterns. The disappearance of wetlands is linked to deforestation. As vegetation cover is lost, the soil no longer retains water, and watercourses weaken or disappear. Alexis explains that these changes cannot be understood without considering the social and economic transformations of the territory.

Villarrica is an internationally renowned tourist destination, known for its volcano (Rukapillán in Mapuzungun language), its lakes, and its proximity to Chile’s national parks. This geographical condition has generated growing real estate pressure and a reconfiguration of land use. “There are many people wanting to come here and making offers to buy land,” he notes. For Mapuche families, this has been a dilemma: selling may be an immediate economic solution, but it also means losing their ties to the territory.

Tourism, moreover, introduces other tensions. Although it does not function here as an extractive industry in the classical sense, its effects are profound. Mapuche identity has frequently been commercialized by external actors, to the point of displacing those who live it in their daily lives. “An image is being sold, but not necessarily by people from the territory, and this directly affects our income,” Alexis notes. Mass tourism has a local impact, contributing to the acceleration of damages caused by climate change.

Prices have been adjusted to cater to tourist consumers, and pressure on groundwater has made access to water irregular, despite the region’s high rainfall. The Lake Villarrica case (Mallolafquén in Mapuzungun language), declared a saturated zone in 2017 by Chile’s Ministry of the Environment, serves as a nationwide warning of what happens when human activity affects an ecosystem's ability to regenerate itself.

Faced with this diagnosis, the Caniulef community decided to organize differently and develop a 10-year governance plan structured around four dimensions: social, economic, cultural, and ecological. On the social front, they seek to strengthen community organization and create spaces for gathering in a context marked by fragmentation and mistrust. In this context, the ancient Mapuche memory that remains present in the families of the community is fertile in collaboration, work and connection with Afunalhue, which facilitate proposing and defining a future for this territory.

Economically, they do not reject tourism, but they wish to redefine it. Through the Afunalhue Mapuche Cultural Fair, an event they have been organizing for over 15 years, families offer products and experiences linked to their culture. This provides them with summer income that sustains their annual finances. At the same time, they hold culinary workshops featuring native species, as well as workshops on entrepreneurship and traditional crafts, with women constituting the majority of participants.

Culturally, it aims to revive a biocultural memory: reviving Mapudungun—spoken today only by less than 10% of the Mapuche population in Chile—and the use of plants in food, medicine, and crafts. Instead of reviving isolated elements of the ancestral culture, Alexis insists that the goal is to connect and strengthen these practices that remain present on the land.

On the ecological front, community nurseries have been built, and work is being done with students on environmental education and interventions on family properties. Alexis explains that these actions help restore vegetation cover, improve water retention, and contribute to the stability of the local ecosystem. Through land management workshops, the plan also seeks to make Itrofil Mongen a daily practice: how a plot of land relates to the watershed, how solar orientation and winds influence the spread of fires, and how the soil can retain water.

“We seek the ecological, social, and community regeneration of the territory. We want to stop putting out fires,” Alexis summarizes , with a clear intention of building greater resilience and going beyond emergency response. In an uncertain political context, where Mapuche communities have historically maintained contentious relations with the Chilean state, the José Luis Caniulef community engages in dialogue and supports its demands with cultural arguments, scientific information and jointly agreed proposals, which demonstrate that they are the ones who inhabit the territory, and therefore should have influence over its future.

Regeneration in Afunalhue is a continuous process. The community has implemented the first two of its ten-year plan. However, the recovery of the Itrofil Mongen is, for the Mapuche people, a long-term process. Thus, the 16 wetlands that have disappeared cease to be an isolated statistic in a diagnostic report and become a benchmark for measuring the life that can still be restored, which begins to take shape in ancient Mapuche memory and seeks to continue defining its way of life.