Isle of spirits and dark arts

As far as sorcery and wizards go, the Chilean island of Chiloe rivals the world of Harry Potter. Mark Rowe lets his imagination run riot on a trip bedevilled by vultures, trolls and dense fog

Middle England, as you may have noticed, teems with locations claiming an affinity to Harry Potter, most of which could charitably be described as tendentious. For the "real" thing you need to travel a little further, to the island of Chiloe, 500 miles south of Santiago, the capital of Chile.

If ever there were a home for wizards and witches, where every night carries the ethereal spirit of midsummer, it is here - the point at which this finger-thin country fractures into archipelagos, fjords and icefields.

Our ferry left the Chilean mainland on a golden evening, cormorants flying in pyramid formation, the odd Humboldt penguin swimming sidestroke beside us. Half an hour later the light was already fading as the vessel scraped on to the tiny ramp at Chiloe's port of Chacao. A thick fog descended with a suddenness that forced even the recklessly macho drivers of Chile to slow down. This was a cold, silvery pea-souper, the sort of mist in which Lord Voldemort could roam to his heart's content.

The bus meandered onwards, occasionally rising over hills above the mist to allow glimpses of isolated houses built of tejuelas, wooden tiles of alerce, a Chilean larch. Candles flickered on the window ledges and the shadows of the occupants were thrown into giant, Hagrid-size relief on the living-room walls.

Chiloe's attraction lies in a scenic coastline that is dotted with hundreds of little-visited islets, caves and rain-swept coves. Many inhabitants live in palafitos - houses built out over the water on stilts. Local lore has it that practitioners of the dark arts reside hereabouts. You might, so the tales go, spot a skeleton of a sailor riding a giant seahorse across a bay. Or a peucho, a mini-wizard who spreads diseases, unidentified by modern science. There's the cuchivilu, half-pig, half-serpent, which roots out family fish stores. Another favourite is Trauco, an ugly troll blamed for unwanted pregnancies. A statue of him is accordingly chained to restrain him from wandering from the picturesque main square in Ancud, the island's most northerly town. They may need to cough up for a new padlock, though, for Chiloe is flooded with implausibly large numbers of youngsters; even down remote tracks to isolated villages we would pass a single-class school packed with perhaps 40 children.

Mythology, together with the bucolic serenity of restful rolling hills and wooden architecture, gives Chiloe an alluring and otherworldly air. Our hotel in Ancud, a wooden, high-ceilinged affair with a creaky staircase, was dark and locked up when we arrived. We established we were the first guests in eight days (in a week on Chiloe we stayed in three other hotels, all of them otherwise empty). The silent, isolated evenings, heads buried in books on the legends of the island, fuelled the imagination.

Outside, always, are the jotas, black-feathered, red-beaked vultures. If you sit by the remains of the Spanish forts around Ancud they land silently behind you, Hitchcock fashion. In the town's harbour they tug at the fishing nets to peck at the day's catch.

When the skies clear, you can see across to the volcanoes on the mainland and the Chilean Lake District. The rolling hills and carefully tended landscape around us recalled south Devon. More often, though, Chiloe is extremely wet, and we saw cattle pulling carts on sleds rather than wheels, which make it easier to cope with the sodden mud tracks that prevail outside summer.

That spectral mist is never far away, quickly turning bright sunshine into wintry gloom before evaporating, revealing Ancud to be an unexpectedly attractive town. Bright yellow fishing boats bob at anchor in the harbour; there are palm trees and, puzzlingly, a graphic sculpture of a woman in labour. There is an excellent museum, home to the original Galeta Ancud, the boat that carried the first settlers down to the Magellan Straits of the even deeper south.

Life developed a pattern at our hotel. Arturo, the owner, served us Nescafé with steamed milk and rolls with laminated cheese, the standard breakfast served the 2,400-mile length of Chile. Arturo urged us to head for Chiloe's islands. Despite Ancud's charm, there was a night-time edge to the place that made us heed his advice.

When Charles Darwin visited Chiloe in 1835 he described the island as "the end of Christendom". He was speaking in both a geographical and spiritual sense; the belief systems of Chiloe's aboriginal peoples, the Mapuche, merged more harmoniously with the conquering Spanish than in most parts of the continent. It was perhaps these strong pagan traditions that inspired the Spanish to build more and bigger churches in an effort to ward off opposing spirits.

Take a random stony track off the island's single main road and you soon encounter an incongruously large place of worship in a one-horse community. Some are pretty affairs, such as that at Tenaun. This is a settlement of at most 40 houses, where the congregation gathers within a blue wooden church that sports two huge yellow stars on its exterior walls. The church at nearby Quicavi is said to boast the densest number of sorcerers, and is said to be the centre of Chilote mythology.

The outstanding church, though, is the Iglesia San Francisco in Castro, the capital of the island. Painted yellow and blue outside, the church is truly staggering in its design, arches, buttresses and columns made of wood where you would expect stone or marble.

In the event, we never knowingly met a witch, something of a disappointment given the tourist office's assertion that many purveyors of spells and sorcery led ordinary lives by day. But they were there if your imagination wanted them to be: in the long, raven-dark hair of the schoolgirls, along those empty hotel corridors and in the wavering shadows at the windows of the palafitos. Sorcerers every one of them.

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

When to go: The further south you go in Chile, the more extreme the weather becomes. At this time of year it is approaching midwinter in the southern hemisphere, so you should wait at least a couple of months. December is probably the best month to be there, but flights at that time of year tend to be pricy. November or February are probably better options.

Getting there: A range of airlines will take you to the capital of Chile, Santiago, with at least one stop en route. Both Journey Latin America (020-8747 8315; www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk) and South American Experience (020-7976 5511; www.southamericanexperience.com) are currently offering a fare of £742 return for travel in the month of November from London via Madrid and Santiago to Puerto Montt, the nearest airport to the island of Chiloe, with Lan Chile. The London to Madrid leg is on British Airways or Iberia.

From Puerto Montt a bus to Ancud takes around two-and-a-half hours and costs about £8 for a return ticket, including the ferry crossing.