Greetings again from the far south!  I returned lat night from my adventure on the Mainstream pontoon and interviews in the community of Rio Verde near where the concessions are.  Well, I use “near” in the loosest sense of the word….these concessions are super remote.  About 2 hours from Rio Verde by car/boat in total and 1 hour (or 19 nautical miles) from the nearest residents. (It was hard to get an idea of the scale of this place by just looking on the map.)  The area is super strange.  It is made up of “estancias” or large ranches (picture when you are driving in rural Colorado or Wyoming and just see the large gates on the side of the road and a dirt road stretching back to where the ranch supposedly is, but you can’t see it.  That is what it is like here.  The reason the census revealed that it is mostly male is that people come to the area to work on the ranches (or now, in the new mine) but their families live in other places like Punta Arenas. They will work 14 days on and 7 off, for example. The local school has 3 students currently and the parents all work for the municipality.   The owners of the ranches generally have owned the lands for a long time and are of European descent.  They saw the ranches expropriated during the Allende era, given back in parcels by Pinochet and have, apart from this, tried to maintain a pretty isolated existence.  The owners also split their time between Punta Arenas, Santiago or another urban areas and time on the ranches and are all old (hypertension is the biggest medical issue in the area).  I think, with the incoming development, the uses and demographic of this area will be changing a great deal in the next 20 years when this generation is gone….