Lolol

A chef in Santa Cruz mentioned Lolol to me between courses — I was eating at her small restaurant near the plaza and had asked where she sourced her cheese. “A farm outside Lolol,” she said, and then, when I looked blank: “It’s a village. In the hills. Very small. Very old. Almost no one goes.” She said it the way someone mentions a book that has been sitting on their shelf for years, something they keep meaning to recommend but haven’t because they’re not sure you’re the right person for it. I went the next morning.

Lolol sits forty kilometers west of Santa Cruz, up into the coastal foothills where the valley’s vineyard geometry gradually gives way to rougher country — drier hills, older timber, the road becoming two-lane and then one and a half and then a suggestion. The village has fewer than five hundred residents, a main street of adobe buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and an architectural coherence that is the product of benign neglect rather than preservation effort. Nobody restored Lolol’s colonial streetscape. They simply never demolished it.

The buildings have the characteristic form of the Central Valley’s colonial architecture: thick adobe walls, overhanging carved wooden eaves that extend to provide shade in summer and cover during the valley’s brief winter rains, heavy wooden doors set in arches that are slightly asymmetrical in the way that handmade things are. Some walls are whitewashed, others left in the raw earth-brown of the adobe. A bougainvillea had escaped one courtyard and was consuming the adjacent wall with cheerful aggression. The church at the plaza end of the main street was locked, but the plaza itself had a bench and a tree and two elderly men conducting what appeared to be a long-running conversation that had moved well beyond the need for continuous sentences.

The cheese was the reason the chef had mentioned Lolol, and the cheese was the reason I found a small workshop on the edge of the village where a man named Edmundo was pressing rounds of fresh goat cheese in wooden forms. He let me taste a three-week-old round alongside a six-week-old — the first mild and milky, the second firmer and carrying a faint grassiness that was unmistakably this particular hillside — and sold me two rounds wrapped in paper. I ate one that afternoon with crackers I’d brought from Santa Cruz and a glass of wine from a bottle the hospedaje charged me three hundred pesos for, and the combination on that particular afternoon, at that particular table with the valley below going amber, was one of those meals I will remember when I have forgotten the names of cities.

Lolol has no tasting room and no boutique hotel and no organised anything. It has a hospedaje with three rooms and a restaurant that opens when it decides to. It has the cheese and the colonial street and the view from the hilltop above the village where the entire Colchagua Valley spreads below, the vineyards visible as dark green geometry against the paler floor of the valley, the coastal range in the west, the Andes in the east, enormous and indifferent. I stood up there for twenty minutes and a condor circled once, at significant altitude, and then went about its business.

When to go: The village is pleasant year-round, but October through May avoids the wet of winter and benefits from better road conditions. The light in March and April — harvest season — turns the surrounding hills extraordinary colours. Come on a weekday; on the rare occasions Lolol has visitors, they tend to arrive on weekends.