Santa Clara

Introduction and Points of Divergence
The original point of divergence is set 40 MYA, when the Santa Clara hotspot opened latitudinally, creating a divergent rigde and the formation of a barrier submarine volcano, akin to a much smaller version of the Siberian Traps. 20 million years after, this geologic accident would emerge to the surface, creating a fastly-growing island, which was easily colonized by neotropical vegetal and animal species in few millions of years. Still growing, the island reached a size comparable to Hainan in historic times (around 33.000 sq. km), but with a heavily sloped terrain, plenty of active volcanoes and rift valleys.

The first point of divergence happened in the mid 11th century C.E., when the growing population of Rapa Nui (Easter) Island sailed eastward to find another land to populate: while the northbound travellers found the coasts of South America and the much useful sweet potato which they bringed back to their islands, the southernmost adventurers were grabbed by the swirling currents of the South Pacific Gyre to the land they called Hou Hiva.

Back to Rapa Nui arrived the news of a huge land, so high their hills the clouds got entangled on their peaks, with almost frozen water running on enormous streams at the depths of sharp ravines, and boiling water emerging from the soil, accompained of yellow, breathtaking clouds. That description was taken by the ruling class as proof that their adventurers have found no land and were lying, or even worse, that they have indeed found a land forbid for people to inhabit. That, added to the lack of a previous prediction of the island, as happened with Rapa Nui, was enough for the Ariki to dismiss the discovery and forbid more travels to the east.

Four centuries after, when a civil war broke on the overpopulated Rapa Nui, some islanders decided to try luck and find the now mythical Hou Hiva sailing to the east. Sadly, it was too late for them to set a firm foot on this new land, because just decades after their arriving, Juan Fernández, a portuguese navigator serving to the spanish Crown and searching for a faster route between El Callao and Valparaíso, found the island he called Santa Clara on August, 12th of 1574.

When arriving at Valparaíso, the news of a vast, forested island on the southern seas begun the Santa Clara Craze, and many spaniards newly established in the port and Santiago decided to embark to a new conquest instead of waiting for a new defeat in hands of the araucanians as the one happened recently in Purén or the shock of an earthquake as the one that destroyed Concepción in 1570.

Those first spaniards, backed by the actions of Bravo de Saravia, Royal Governor of Chile, carried captured araucanians with them as work indians, most of whom readily escaped their captors once arriving to Santa Clara's first port and village, San Mateo, a sandy cove on the north of the island. Those araucanian 'cimarrones' were the only hope for the isolated houhivans that inhabited the southernmost tip of the island, because they were already inmune to the diseases the spaniards bring to this land. Even if most houhivans died of smallpox, contagied by the araucanians, a few had mixed children that born inmune.

A double process of colonization ensued in the island, with the now firmly settled indigenous peoples sparsely populating the south and adopting the language and customs of the araucanians; and the spaniard colonizers accompained by more docile indians establishing mining towns on the north, where the rift valley exposed gold deposits, further contributing to the aforementioned Santa Clara Craze, now even dubbed the authentic location of the mythical El Dorado.