The Story Of Pasko Baburica (Baburizza)
The life of the Kalamota born Pasko Baburica (Baburizza) could serve as the plot for a movie. A poor young man with only four years of elementary school and four years of work experience in a general store dared to sail across the ocean into a completely different and unknown world. There, he built a fortune, which he generously donated to those in need both in his old homeland and his new home.
He never married nor started a family; some rumors say he never got over the loss of his fiancée who died young. Known as the “King of Saltpeter,” he died in 1941 from the “disease of the poor” — tuberculosis — in his villa perched on a cliff above Valparaiso, overlooking the ocean, surrounded by seven servants. His plans to help his homeland after the end of World War II remained just dreams.
Pasko Baburica was born on April 28, 1875, on Kalamota (Koločep Island) to Ivan and Katica (née Šoletić). At thirteen, he left his native island and found work in Trebinje as an assistant in a general store. At seventeen, he worked in Dubrovnik as a merchant assistant, but after the death of his father, he returned to Lopud. In 1892, encouraged by a relative, he left his homeland and set off into the unknown.
Pasko Baburica (Baburizza)
In the city of Iquique in northern Chile, he continued working in a general store, which he soon bought and began to run independently. Before long, he became a partner in a trading company and gradually became a co-owner of industrial, shipping, and trading enterprises.
He traded in meat, wine, livestock, animal feed, and leather, but he became most famous as the “King of Saltpeter.” Saltpeter, or more precisely potassium nitrate, is mainly used as fertilizer, in the production of gunpowder and nitric acid, as a meat preservative, a component in rocket fuel, and in the production of glass, enamel, toothpaste, and more.
Pasko bought the most significant saltpeter factory in Chile, and six years later, together with partners, another one. After purchasing several more saltpeter factories and merging with other similar enterprises, Baburica became the world’s wealthiest “salitrero” in the 1920s. He owned 30% of Chile’s total “white gold” production. A large portion of the 30,000 workers in his companies were immigrants from his homeland.
The “King of Saltpeter” foresaw the decline of the saltpeter market and reorganized his businesses around 1930. He began investing in insurance companies and agriculture, purchasing ships, and trading coal and oil. He became the largest shareholder of the Chilean state bank, Banco Nacional de Chile, and a co-owner of Banco Yugoslavo.
In 1924, together with partners, he founded the shipping company Yugoslav-American Navigation, which five years later, after merging with the Atlantic Navigation “Ivo Račić,” grew into the even larger Yugoslav Lloyd. From his early immigrant days, he helped not only his compatriots in South America but also his new homeland, Chile.
He participated in the construction projects of the city and port of Antofagasta, envisioning it as a future major Pacific port. He was one of the founders of an agricultural institute near Valparaiso, which is still funded by his foundation and bears the name “El Instituto Agrícola Pascual Baburizza.”
Baburica never forgot his homeland, his birth island, Dubrovnik, and Croatia. He financed the construction of public buildings and cultural institutions in Dubrovnik, Split, Zagreb, and Belgrade. On Kalamota, he helped renovate the parish church, contributed to the construction of a pier and a waiting room, arranged the Ratac Park, and funded the opening of a road around the Donje Čelo harbor.
Thanks to his donation, Dubrovnik’s Renaissance city bell tower, which was in danger of collapse, was thoroughly restored in 1929. Citizens erected a commemorative plaque for him on the bell tower, which can still be seen today, and he was declared an honorary citizen of Dubrovnik.
Baburica never married, had no descendants, and never took Chilean citizenship. He lived a reclusive life in a spacious villa on a cliff above Valparaiso, overlooking the ocean, surrounded by seven servants. He died of tuberculosis in 1941. Some unconfirmed stories say that his only love died young, and that Baburica brought her mother from Antofagasta to live with him in Valparaiso, built her a house, and took lifelong care of her.
Today, Baburica’s villa is a fine arts museum. In front of it, he built a promenade called “Paseo Yugoslavo.” In the city of Viña del Mar, a tourist resort near Valparaiso, Baburica planted and arranged the botanical park “Parque del Salitre,” while on his estate in the town of Los Andes, on the slopes of the Cordillera, he founded the agricultural institute “San Felipe,” where poor boys were educated for agricultural professions.
In his will, he left Chile not only his palace, agricultural institute, and botanical park but also a collection of valuable art — about three hundred paintings and other works. To the Croatian community, he left a large house in Santiago, the rent from which was intended to fund the education of poor Croatian students in Chile and to provide care for elderly and sick members of the Croatian diaspora.
He built his mausoleum at the local cemetery in Valparaiso, with a view of the open sea from where he once appeared on the Chilean horizon as a young man. Today, this elevated spot above the city symbolically marks his unfulfilled longing to return home.
Author: Katarina Fiorović
Sources:
Tuga Tarle: “Golden Pillars of Chilean Society,” Croats in Chile, Part 2. https://hrvatskiglas-berlin.eu/
Salih Zvizdić: Pasko Baburica. Life of an Emigrant. Vjesnik, 41(1980) 12–22.