This article analyses how the first circumnavigation of the world, from 1519 to 1522, introduced South America as a key space in the formation of the ‘global’, thus producing a historical point of inflection. We examine the commercial and political plans and networks that began to function as a result of this new connectivity, which turned the American continent into a major global axis. The analysis focuses on the way in which this voyage gave new prominence to an unexplored region of the world, namely the southernmost tip of America, thus changing the notion of habitability that had prevailed for centuries in Europe. These changes questioned the authority of ‘ancient’ Greek thinkers and strengthened a European historical narrative that appropriated the discovered territories and distinguished the extreme southern part of America from other southern regions, as symbolized through figures such as the Patagonian giants. I consider these changes based on evidence from Spanish sources.

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RESUMENEl presente artículo abordará algunos de los factores y situaciones que determinaron, en cierta medida, la manera de comprender, recordar y representar el tema telúrico por parte de los pobladores de Chile durante los siglos XVI-XVIII. Por lo general, los estudios históricos han dado una mayor relevancia a subordinar lo anterior al aspecto religioso que era muy importante en esos años, sin embargo, se exhibirá cómo infl uyeron aspectos que fueron más allá de esta esfera, entre los que destacan, las percepciones e imágenes que se tenían sobre el territorio chileno y los diferentes intereses económicos y políticos que tenían las autoridades en aquella época. Por otra parte, el texto buscará comprobar la importancia de incluir dentro de los análisis de las catástrofes, asociados siempre a otras disciplinas, la perspectiva histórica.Palabras clave: Terremotos, Chile, Historia, seguridad, riesgo, memoria, olvido. ABSTRACTThis article will address some of the factors and situations that determined, to some extent, how telluric events are understood, remembered, and represented by Chilean society from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Generally, historical studies have greatly minimized the importance of these events, favoring instead aspects related to religious beliefs that were of great signifi cance at the time, however, in this paper other infl uencing factors beyond religious arguments are examined, most notably, perceptions and images held of the Chilean territory and the various economic and political interests of authorities at the time. Moreover, this study investigates the importance of including the historical perspective, always associated with other disciplines, in the analysis of disasters.

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