The humidity of the southern weather has disabled the conservation of these objects. However the trail of mapuche baskets can be followed through the stories left by the first spanish chronicles and afterwards by travelers.
Metawe They are of usefull character principally. This mapuche basket can be considered like the most representative between their baskets. It has strong and thick texture that make besides the characteristics of its rigid fiber a container of great resistence and capacity. It serves to contain, move and wash grains such wheat and corn.
LLepu or Balai is the name that this mapuche basket receives, that is used mainly to throw and clean cereals. It is knitted in different places in the same way but with different materials: with Ñoca in Arauco, with Quila in Cautín and with Boqui Pifulco in San Juan de la Costa. The technique used is with the aduja, that gives objects of great resistence and lasting.
Huilliches baskets
In San Juan de la Costa near Osorno, baskets knitted with Boqui is quite characteristic.
Two typesof baskets are elaborated. The one that uses "Quila" as raw material, it can be used to make baskets of various sizes destined for sale or domestic use: closets, baskets for washing clothes and wool. Baskets for wheat, to pick potatos or murtas. And the one that use "Boqui" as raw material, worked with the needle technique and the buttonhole stich: this production is of specialists and since the 80´s decade it is orientated to the matket. The "Boqui" is a variety of bindweed that grows in the mountains in the thickest part of the native forest, offering thickness and solidity to this handcraft.