“… I had the impression that poetry had became matter, thing, object -wrote the culture and patrimonial counsellor of the Junta de Extremadura, Spain, Francisco Muñoz Ramírez-. Everything in the house was poetry. A poetry so personal, so nerudian, that the visitor, following the thread of objects, could rebuild the poet’s biography”.

Back in Chile from Europe, in 1937, the poet was looking for place to work on his Canto general, a great book on the history, the nature and struggles of the people from the Americas. “The wild seashore of Isla Negra, with the tumultuous movements of the ocean, allowed me to passionately get involved in the labour of my new chant”- he wrote in his memoirs.

Mr. Eladio Sobrino, a Spanish sailor who, as it is said, decided to stay in Chile after losing his ship in Punta Arenas, had bought a big piece of land over the coast in Chile’s central littoral in 1935. In 1938, Neruda bought from him a part of land with a stone cottage projected by Luz Sobrino, Mr. Eladio’s daughter. The house, sized around 70 mt.2, had a dining room, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms.

“The house… I don’t know when it was born… It was the middle of the afternoon, we arrived riding horses to those lonely domains –the poet wrote- … Mr. Eladio was ahead, fording the grown Córdoba stream. For the first time I sensed as a punch this smell of sea winter, a blend of boldo and salted sand, seaweed and thistles.

“Here, said Mr. Eladio (sailor) and there we stayed. The house grew afterwards, like people and trees do”.

The house grew indeed. A few years after buying it, the poet and Catalan architect Germán Rodríguez Arias began a series of additions. There is a preserved sketch in which Neruda expresses three intentions: a tower in the access, a chimney and a big, large window facing the sea.

Rodríguez Arias made the blueprints in the winter of 1943, the works ended near March, 1945.
Raúl Bulnes remembers the difficulties to build in Isla Negra around that time: “As there were no bridges, the stream had to be forded in a cart” carried by oxen and there was neither technology nor equipment in the whole area.

Isla Negra is not an island. In the beginning it was called Las Gaviotas. The “negra” of the name could have come from the black colour of its rocky places. But where did the “isla” come from? In a letter he sends from Java to Argentinean writer Héctor Eandi, Neruda tells him he is laying looking at the black island of Sumatra. The memory of that eastern island prompted him to christen the place with a name that has come to be one of the nerudian emblems.

The first important intervention on the Isla Negra house was the roofless tower, reminiscent of the Mediterranean European architecture, to which the poet later added a roof to make it similar to the houses he remembered from his childhood in Temuco. The additions cycle ends with the Covacha, a space the poet devoted to his literary work, which he ordered to build in wood and zinc roof to hear the rain. According to Elena Mayorga, this brings us again to “a reinterpretation of the maternal house in Temuco”.

To build his houses, Neruda always looked for places related to natural stages or elements, such as the sea and its waves, the beach and the rocks in Isla Negra. “The Pacific Ocean overflowed the map. There was no place to put it on. It was so big, unruly and blue that it fitted nowhere. That’s why they left it in front of my window”.

Near these open spaces facing an exterior presided by the sea, there are others as the Covacha, a closed space, only with a small window towards the sea where the poet found peace to write.

Sergio Soza, architect and friend of Neruda’s, was in charge of new additions to the house from 1965. He projected the arches that join the sections of the house and the areas of the horse room and the Covacha.
Neruda wrote an important piece of his literary work in the Isla Negra house. He gathered most part of his books there and also practiced hospitality, a social activity he inherited from his southern childhood.

There were many guests invited to the generous table of the poet and the celebrations held in that house. The last of them was a sad one. Neruda always celebrated Chilean independence anniversary. Though the situation in the country was adverse, some friends arrived at Isla Negra on September 18th, 1973. They only brought alarming or sad news from Santiago.

The next day, already seriously ill, Neruda was taken in ambulance to the capital, from where he would return to Isla Negra in December 1992, when his remains were moved there, next to Matilde’s. This funeral was carried on with all honours and the presence of the country’s most important authorities. So the poet’s will was accomplished. Almost fifty years before he had expressed in his poem “Disposiciones” from Canto General:

“Comrades, bury me in Isla Negra/ in front of the sea I know, of every sand rugged with stones/ and with waves my lost eyes/ will not see again…”