Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago de Chile and opened up a territory that no one had managed to subdue before. But his story doesn't end there. He died in Tucapel, defeated and executed by those who had learned to fight him. And yet, as time went on, his stature only grew. Statues, poems, banknotes, city names... for centuries he was elevated to a symbol of a country, until that very symbol began to crack. Javier de Navascués, author of *Adventurers of the New World: Heroes and Villains Who Forged Hispanic America*, traces Valdivia's trajectory here from two perspectives that rarely intersect. On the one hand, the man: a soldier trained in Europe, a captain who invested his fortune in an uncertain venture and built a city in hostile territory. On the other, his legacy: how his image evolved from 16th-century chronicles to current debates, passing through *La Araucana*, Chilean nationalism, and contemporary reinterpretations. Through specific episodes--the conquest of Arauco, his death, the construction of the myth, and his presence in the public sphere--the book traces the legacy of a figure who has never ceased to change over time. "Let there be a memory of me henceforth," Valdivia himself wrote. He had one, but it was not a single one.