Chile — Vicuña, the birthplace of Chile's first Nobel Laureate, writer Gabriela Mistral, is a dusty little town in the north of the country with colourful facades and cracked cobblestone squares.
The breeze fans its streets, billowing curtains out across empty sidewalks, and street sellers shrink away from the oppressive desert heat, taking their jams and sugar-coated papaya slivers into the shade of covered markets.
A few miles outside of this small town, nestled in the Atacama Desert — one of the driest places on Earth — camouflaged against the reddish brown of a harsh rocky slope, is a research facility dug into the hillside, its hum of activity carried on the dry desert breeze.
This is the Initihuasi seed bank, the mothership in a nationwide network of facilities which are preserving the biological record of Chile's flora under the strictest of conditions.
"The most important thing for a seed bank is to be away from large populations, because the idea is to save the seeds from catastrophes like wars, among other things," said Ana Sandoval, a researcher who has worked at the center for more than a decade.
"That's why we're in a remote place, far from big cities, near a little town."
The thick concrete walls are earthquake-proof, and the seeds are stored in a walk-in freezer, kept at -4 degrees Fahrenheit and 15% humidity. They use aluminum pouches rather than glass vials in case of seismic activity.
In the close heat of the laboratory outside the freezer, Sandoval proffers bulbs and spotted seeds stored in a series of jars, explaining that one of the specimens in the store had even even declared extinct at the turn of the 19th century.
Another, a blue crocus which was exported to Europe as an ornamental plant, was rediscovered in the Andes around Chile's capital, Santiago, 50 years after it was declared extinct, and a team was sent out to collect its seeds for preservation.
"We have a very important mission, because we are contributing to the conservation of our biodiversity," said Sandoval proudly.
Chile is home to 4,655 plant species, of which 46% are endemic — meaning they are native only to Chile.
The Intihuasi seed bank is not open for public requests for seeds, but some are shared with researchers in exceptional circumstances. In two greenhouses onsite, the team are able to establish the best conditions to germinate and propagate some of the plants; while fieldwork expeditions locate and harvest rare seeds across Chile's huge variety of climates and geographies.
Beneath the sea fog in the Antofagasta region, not far north of Intihuasi, a highly endangered flower, diplostephium paposanum, was collected and returned to the seedbank – where it has been reproduced and a pilot scheme designed for its reintroduction into the wild.
Some of the specimens at Inithuasi have been inducted into a global network of seed banks. Duplicates of its bean species are now held in a Colombian facility for safekeeping, and a handful of maize species kept in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Circle where the global centre for seed preservation has been built deep underground.
Chile is a net exporter of food, with fresh fruit, cereal crops, wine and other produce an important part of the country's economy, benefiting from a Mediterranean-type climate in its central valleys.
Carlos Furche, the director of the national network of seed banks, has spent 50 years working with food systems around the world, and was even Chile's minister for agriculture from 2014 to 2018, as well as advising the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.
"What we have here is a backup of all of the important genetic material from around the country," he said. "This is a 'Noah's Ark' for Chilean agriculture."
Furche says that global agriculture has survived by adapting to changes in environments, and Chile is poised to be one of the countries most affected by climate change.
"Within a few decades, conditions in Chile will be very different," said Furche.
"With what we have here in this seed bank, we are going to be able to adapt to these new demands, and we will keep expanding the amount of material we have."
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