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From Yungay to Osaka: Chile's Forest Wealth Shines in Japan
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From Yungay in the Ñuble Region to the city of Osaka, Japan, the wood supporting "Makün: The Mantle of Chile" has traveled—the grand installation representing our country at Expo Osaka 2025.
The piece, approximately 240 m2 in size, consists of a massive textile created by 200 weavers from the La Araucanía and Biobío regions, belonging to five Mapuche associations, with its framework built using wood from the company Arauco.
Designed by the architecture firm Constructo, the work symbolizes Chile's cultural richness and its commitment to sustainability, a principle that guides all of Arauco's operations, both in Chile and globally.
"We feel deeply honored and happy to represent Chile at a global-scale event like Expo Osaka. This is a unique opportunity to showcase to the world our country's potential, its cultural wealth, and the commitment of companies like Arauco to sustainability, innovation, and development with local identity," said Charles Kimber, Corporate Manager of People and Sustainability at Arauco.
Strategic Opportunity
Chile's participation in Expo Osaka represents a strategic opportunity to strengthen its international presence, especially in Asia, and project an image of a modern, sustainable, and culturally rich country.
Along the same lines, Fernando Marcone, Arauco's Wood Construction Submanager, stated, "Participating in Expo Osaka was the result of intense collaborative work between the project's design team and a multidisciplinary team from Arauco, who managed to transform the design of a pavilion into something manufacturable, transportable in containers, and logically well-planned for assembly on the other side of the world. Without a doubt, the effort was worth it: Chile and its great forest potential are represented in Japan, a country with a millennia-old tradition of wood construction, at a turning point where the use of this material is becoming widespread for building sustainable cities."
Certified Forests
The wood used in the structure comes from certified forests, where trees were planted, cared for over 24 years, and replanted after harvest. This long-term vision has enabled the use of renewable wood in national and global initiatives like the one we now see in Japan. In this case, the piece was made of cross-laminated timber from the Hilam plant in the commune of Yungay, Ñuble Region.
Additionally, beyond Chile's pavilion, wood plays a central role at Expo Osaka 2025, which features a large platform known as the Grand Ring—2 kilometers in circumference, between 12 and 20 meters high, and 30 meters wide—built with 27,000 cubic meters of wood sourced mostly from Japan and Europe.
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