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Description

The Chango people were legally recognized at the end of 2020 as the tenth indigenous people that pre-existed the Chilean nation-state. Dedicated mainly to fishing, hunting, and gathering as complementary subsistence activities, their communities and family clans are currently located between the regions of Tarapacá and O'Higgins.

In this case study, we describe the historical, sociocultural and political-ecological characteristics of the Changa Mareras de Topocalma communities, who live in central Chile in the current O'Higgins Region, an area of global importance for biodiversity, where they guard their Indigenous Conservation Territory or Territory of Life.

Along the 142 km of coastline that currently comprises the O'Higgins Region, there are more than twenty settlements distributed in the four coastal communes of the current Cardenal Caro province, in which the Chango family clans have maintained their ways of life and customs over generations, combining work at sea, with complementary seasonal trades such as fishing in lagoons and sea, the collection and handling of algae and shellfish, as well as small-scale agriculture and aquaculture, animal husbandry and the collection of plants used for food and medicinal purposes.

The Changa marera communities described here, inhabit and move seasonally along the coastal and lagoon environments of Hacienda Topocalma, a rustic property privatized and expropriated during the dictatorial period that began in 1973. In this ancestral space, their territoriality is still exercised in fact, being a place with respect to which they have a deep feeling of rootedness, due to the fact that it was used and inhabited in a traditional way by their family clans, who developed detailed and specific knowledge of the local landscape, graphed in a high degree of specialization achieved in agroecological work, breeding and fishing, thus prolonging a biocultural heritage common to those who were part of the local coastal hacienda system until 1980, when the process of local agrarian counter-reform deepened, after which the progressive forced expulsion of these communities from the interior of the Hacienda to different rural places, inside and outside the region began.

Currently, these family communities settle in their settlement located on Hueso de Ballena Beach every new season of gathering and working together, maintaining their way of life and ancestral customs linked to the use of the sea intergenerationally.

The territory of life of the Chango people of Topocalma is based on the deep relationship maintained between the community, nature and their culture. For those who are part of these communities in this ancestral ecoregion, nature as the supreme force is the one who regulates the biological reproductive cycles of marine and terrestrial species, so respect for this criterion has been established as an unavoidable ethical principle that justifies the care of the maritorio, -interface area between sea, lagoons, estuaries and territory- and constitutes the common basis of the relationship of reciprocity established between people and the natural world.

The elements that make up their bioculture or biocultural heritage include traditional ecological knowledge, practices and beliefs passed down over more than five generations.

History and activities

Topocalma is an ancestral indigenous settlement, located on the central coast of Chile where Cacique Topocalma lived, a traditional indigenous authority subjected to the slave system of exploitation of indigenous labor called "encomienda" initiated in the area by the Spaniard Pedro de Valdivia in colonial times. The name of this Cacique and his people appear in colonial records (proofs of merit) dating back to 1544, as well as in maps and historical documents that include litigation for dispossession. During the colonial and republican periods, the territory became part of the system of haciendas and coastal latifundia. In the midst of this context, the Changa families continued to live and work there performing agricultural and livestock work, as well as fishermen-gatherers on the coast and in the Topocalma lagoon.

Along the coast of the O Higgins region, free access to the beaches was restricted by private individuals until 2017. In this context, Topocalma was characterized by being the last hacienda from which its traditional inhabitants were expelled from their places of customary residence, located in the vicinity of the Topocalma lagoon, after a process of lawsuits for simple precariousness, filed in 2016 against the families of Chango fishermen, by a businessman who in 2007 acquired the hacienda, having to leave his home around 2021. Currently, and since that date, communities can only settle in their rucas or huts in the easement zone for fishing, an area of 8 meters of the lands adjacent to the beaches, located along the hacienda.

Changa women mareras of Topocalma, whalebone settlement. Qochayuyo tendal colored in the sun for about 30 day.

Conservation-use and management practices

During this process of resistance to dispossession, community organization has been fundamental to defend the territory and maintain ancestral customary practices. Thus, in 1982, in the midst of a generalized context of ecosystemic, economic and political crisis, the community, together with the members of other Chango marero settlements in the region, established a system of self-determined management of community use and management of the maritorium, called sea plots, through which family clans organize and manage the more than human species present in marine-coastal areas, focusing particularly on the selective and seasonal management of brown macroalgae forests, and their target species, the Qochayuyo, in accordance with shared norms and traditional ecological knowledge.

The current system of local marine management includes rocks discerned as "plots" and classified with proper names where the growth of the Qochayuyo algae is guarded and managed; areas of habitation and settlement; marine areas where there are reefs destined to serve as natural seedbeds; and areas of free access where species other than the Qochayuyo are accessed. The communities at the regional level also promoted a self-imposed annual seasonal ban that governs between the months of May and December, established for the management of the Qochayuyo, which is carried out through selective, manual and seasonal pruning of the adult algae, adapting the work and collection to the conditions of the sea and the climate. The algae that have been uprooted by the natural action of the sea are also collected.

Community management developed from this form of indigenous land use planning contributes to maintaining brown macroalgae forests, especially the Qochayuyo, as well as the more than human species present in these habitats, whose reproductive cycles depend on their interconnection with other algae and species, which are part of these lagoon coastal ecosystems.

The Qochayuyo for these human communities has spiritual, ecological, sociocultural and economic importance. Part of this is evidenced in the fact that the management system created by them respects the seasonal cycles of the species and is complemented and alternated with fishing from the shore, diving, shellfish gathering and the collection of other algae and terrestrial plants for food, medicine, and commercial exchange and barter, whose use is made using the same criterion of respect for minimum sizes, reproductive cycles and the need for direct use for the satisfaction of community food needs. These interconnected activities sustain their livelihoods and, at the same time, maintain the biocultural landscape and local biodiversity.

Community members have witnessed substantial socio-ecological and territorial changes over the past 70 years. According to their vision, the replacement of native forest and associated vegetation in extensive hills and the change of use of several of the units of mixed agricultural landscapes (rotational uses), when abruptly replaced by extensive pine and eucalyptus plantations, have seriously damaged watercourses and springs, influencing the decrease in rainfall, altering local temperatures, decreasing the abundance of species, eroding soils and constricting the natural space of the dunes. Among the anthropic and natural changes that have occurred in the Topocalma lagoon, we can mention the decrease in its depth, the drying up of wetlands, the extinction of springs and other bodies of water, along with the subsequent decrease of species whose natural reproductive cycle depends on the interconnection of terrestrial, coastal, marine and lagoon habitats.

Management and governance

The sea parcel system reflects community self-determination, as well as a deep understanding of territory based on sense of place and the relationships established between species, seasons, and livelihoods. However, the community notes that state fisheries regulations do not always recognize or incorporate their traditional ecological knowledge. Requirements governing how and when Qochayuyo is harvested may conflict with local practices and with the weather and tidal conditions on which effective, low-impact management depends. The community notes that it accepted the Benthic Resources Management and Exploitation Areas (AMERB) framework, in part, because it gave artisanal fishers' organizations1 exclusive rights to manage and extract marine resources within demarcated areas. This offered some degree of formal protection from exploitation by third parties. However, the designated area encompassed only a fragment of the community's ancestral coastal marine territory, so other traditionally used areas were accessible to external users, limiting effective recognition of the community's customary governance system.

The territory of life of Topocalma currently faces pressures derived from the privatization and expropriation of community lands and changes in land use, the urban development of real estate projects superimposed on rural territory, restrictions on free access to ancestral customary settlements, increased tourism and recreational activities such as surfing that influence the movement of underwater dunes. Community members denounce the uncontrolled use of vehicles on the beaches, plastic pollution, fishing and diving by external users, illegal fishing, and competition for species and spaces of biocultural importance. They also express concern about scientific visits and prospecting of algae samples without the free, prior, and informed consent of the communities, as well as the fact that external actors benefit from their own ancestral community knowledge and the products derived from the algae managed and safeguarded by them, without duly recognizing the work and contribution of the community.

Next steps and lessons learned

The case study highlights the importance of recognizing the ancestral rights of the Chango people, their customary uses of the territory of life they guard and their community governance and management, as well as the need to protect the continuity of their biocultural heritage. The community's experience shows that the form of conservation of their current Territory depends on intergenerational knowledge, self-organization and management practices adapted to local ecological cycles. Effective protection requires that public authorities and other actors respect community decision-making and free, prior and informed consent, that they recognize traditional ecological knowledge in indigenous fisheries and territorial management and their complementary activities in a general way and that the legal problems arising from the historical process of dispossession and delay in the due legal recognition of their status as an indigenous people pre-existing to the state of Chile are addressed, facts that together have led to changes in the use of the ancestral territory and the uncontrolled external use of the maritorium.

This case study was originally published by UNEP-WCMC in 11/2026. The content was provided by the custodians of this ICCA. The ICCA has been self-declared and has not yet been through a peer-review process to verify its status. More details on this process can be found here. The contents of this website do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of UN Environment Programme or UNEP-WCMC.