Villa Baviera
A German lay preacher ran a sealed colony behind an electrified fence in rural Chile for four decades, with an airstrip, an arms cache, and a free hospital for local people. Underneath it was a torture site used by the secret police. About 122 people still live there and it now serves lunch.
Field Guide Entry
Paul Schafer founded Colonia Dignidad on farmland near Parral in 1961 with a group of German followers. The colony was closed to the outside world by an electrified fence and internal rules that separated families, banned relationships, and put children in communal dormitories. It also ran a hospital that treated local Chileans free of charge, which bought it decades of goodwill in the surrounding countryside.
It had an airstrip and a cache of weapons.
What the state used it for
After the 1973 coup, the DINA, Pinochet's secret police, used the colony as a detention and torture site. This is not contested: it appears in Chile's Rettig and Valech commission reports and in declassified US State Department cables. Prisoners were brought in, and some of them were never accounted for. Their remains have still not been found.
Schafer fled in 1997 as prosecutions closed in, was arrested in Argentina in 2005, and died in 2010 while serving a 20-year sentence for the sexual abuse of children.
An unfinished argument
Chile and Germany agreed in 2017 to turn the site into a memorial and documentation center. The government of Gabriel Boric decreed the expropriation of 117 hectares in July 2025 to build it. On March 30, 2026, the incoming government of Jose Antonio Kast announced a decree revoking that expropriation on cost grounds, which drew a formal response from the German government and from the victims' association, who noted that no alternative guarantee of public access was offered.
Around 122 people still live on the land, trading as Villa Baviera, with a hotel, a restaurant, and food processing. Some were born there. Remnants of the original electric fence are still standing on the grounds.
Visiting Information
The hotel and the Zippelhaus restaurant operate year round and the management arranges tours of the grounds, including trips to nearby sites. Book ahead, because this is a small working operation about an hour off Ruta 5 from Parral, not a museum with opening hours.
There is no interpretive center and no fixed memorial, so what a visitor gets depends heavily on who is guiding and what they choose to say. The status of the memorial project has been unresolved since March 2026 and is worth checking before travel.
The people living here include former members, people born into the colony, and families of those who ran it, and their account of the history is contested by survivor organizations. It is best practice to ask before photographing anyone. Chile carried a US advisory of Level 2 as of 2026.
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