Workshops on making blood sausages, cooking offal or innards, making homemade ice cream with local products and collecting rosehips are all part of the sixth edition of the 2025 Festival de la Cosecha (Harvest Festival) organized annually by the Puerto Guadal Tourism Association. 

 

This year's event will take place over the coming long Easter weekend, on Friday, April 18, and Saturday April 19.

 

Since 2018, the festival has been held in Puerto Guadal, showcasing both traditional and innovative uses for local products. The emphasis is on caring for the natural environment, contributing to the local economy, preserving the local heritage and promoting tourism in the low season. The event annually includes workshops on utilizing local fruits, vegetables and livestock in cooking, such as how to prepare chocolate, apple turnovers, charcuterie, fermented products, elderberry juice, dyes, lamb ham, and much more.

 

"What is interesting this year is that two professionals -- a chef and a pediatrician -- will be joining us to talk about nutrition for the care of children in winter. Although last year we also had an activity with children making apple turnovers. But this year it's expanding a little more," says the president of the local tourism association, Angélica Antiñanco Levicoy. ”Everyone is invited! Mothers, bring your children or come along yourself. This activity will take place on Saturday at 2 pm. We are going to start with this activity focused on children, on their nutrition and care for them.”

On Friday, the program includes a morning worskshop on rosehip harvesting, taking advantage of the fact that this species emerges strongly in the surrounding region during the fall months. As well, Edgardo Pinilla Henríquez will lead a workshop on how to make blood sausages, while chef and culinary researcher Christian Balboa Corvalán will explain the cooking and use of offal, or achuras, which are prepared with animal entrails.

 

On Saturday, the day's festivities get started with members of the Puerto Guadal tourism association -- Rosa Vera Huenul, Angélica Antiñanco Levicoy, Miriam Chible Contreras and Carolina Rojas Román -- cooking on-site the menu “Del Maqui a la Escondida,” which was the result of the pilot project on carbon neutral cuisine developed by the Chelenko Corporation in 2024 in collaboration with SERNATUR Aysén and CORFO, part of the project “Zero Impact Tourism: Added value and climate adaptation with local cuisine and waste management.” Some 30 local entrepreneurs from the fields of gastronomy, lodging, handicrafts, horticulture and local production took part in that project.

 

Children will also have their own activities. Chef Johanna Astudillo Cornejo will hold a workshop on mushrooms and apples in the afternoon especially for them, while pediatrician Ana Becerra will lead a discussion on healthy eating for children during the winter season. Culture will have a part too, with the presentation of the story “Flowering the mind and heart: The magic of harvesting throughout history,” in which Josefina Ruiz Catalán will take us on a journey showing ancestral practices in the Aysen region.

 

After the day's activities, Carolina Rojas will teach us techniques for making homemade ice cream.

 

In parallel, that Saturday, starting at 9 in the morning, there will be a fair with local producers from throughout the region. 

For more information on the program visit the Facebook and Instagram pages of the Puerto Guadal tourism association. There you will find the specific schedule for the workshops, as well as registration forms.

 

The president of the Chelenko Corporation, Miriam Chible Contreras, says the event is way to highlight the beauty and culture to be experienced in the zone outside of the high season, or summer months. "For us, it is necessary to look beyond the summer. To look at the seasons of the year as a whole, because it also allows us to diversify what we can offer tourists as well as people from Aysen."

 

Adds Chible: “In the fall, we can enjoy the astonishing palette of colors and in the winter, slower tourism, closer to the communities, with the warmth of the houses from their wood-burning stove and the slower pace, it allows us to listen to the stories, the epic tales that there are in the region about the way of inhabiting the territory, not only now but also of the first people who came to inhabit those places.” And about spring, she says, “it awakens us with its buds, its colors and the green that populates everything, with which we admire when we travel along the Carretera Austral. The truth is that we are in awe of every season of the year here.”

This new version of the Puerto Guadal Harvest Festival will include, as every year, a fair with local businesses such as cooking and baking, crafts, plants, flowers, furniture made from recycled wood, gold and silver handicrafts, tanned leather, and local beer, among others.

 

Live music will be provided by local artists.

 

The Aysen Regional Strategic Tourism Program (PER), the municipalities of Chile Chico and Cochrane, together with many diverse others, are supporting the organization of this event.