Arauco War

The Arauco War was a long, intermittent conflict fought from the 1540s into the late seventeenth century between Spanish colonial forces, based in the Captaincy General of Chile and backed by the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the Mapuche people of the Araucania region of southern Chile. Fighting began during Pedro de Valdivia's campaigns to found Spanish cities in Mapuche territory in the 1540s and 1550s, and it grew into sustained warfare through a series of major Mapuche uprisings, including the First Great Rebellion of 1553, associated with the Mapuche leaders Lautaro and Caupolican, and the Third Great Rebellion of 1598, which culminated in a decisive Mapuche victory at the Battle of Curalaba. Spanish attempts to subdue the Mapuche and press them into forced labor repeatedly failed, in part because the Mapuche had no prior tradition of the kind of servitude the Spanish demanded, and by around 1600 Spain's efforts at outright conquest of Araucania had been permanently reversed. A durable frontier eventually stabilized between Spanish-held territory and independent Mapuche lands, with more regular diplomatic and trade contact developing between the two sides from the mid-seventeenth century onward.