Demographics
According to the 2002 census by the National Statistics Institute (INE), Temuco had a communal population of 245,347 (117,071 men and 128,276 women). Of these, 232,528 (94.8%) lived in urban areas and 12,819 (5.2%) in rural areas. The population grew by 24.4% (48,111 persons) between the 1992 and 2002 censuses. The INE projected the 2010 population to be 377,495, which makes it the second largest city south of Santiago (behind Concepción), and the fourth largest in the country. One of the distinctive features of Temuco is the strong presence of the Mapuche culture, who make up 23.05% of the population in the Temuco commune, and numerous German immigrant colonies (9.82%). Temuco proper has a population of 227,086.
The locals are called temuquences. Most inhabitants are of different origins. Temuco has a high percentage being of Basque ancestry other than Castilian and other Spanish nationalities. Thus, one can find indigenous, mainly Mapuche, who account for 13% of the population of Temuco, which makes it the largest city of Chile with an indigenous presence. There is also a large percentage of temuquences that are directly descended from European immigrants, many of the early arrivals during 1883–1901, after the pacification of Araucanía. The main sources are from Switzerland, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom and other less numerous in many other parts of Europe such as Netherlands, Austria, Croatia, Armenia, Greece, Portugal and others arrived after that first migration, especially during the World Wars, the Spanish Civil War (1930s) a large percentage being Aragonese, Asturians, Catalans, Galicians, Navarrese and Basques; reaching a significant number of immigrants from Europe (mainly Germany and Spain).
There are also small communities of Jews (i.e. from Russia, Poland, Macedonia, Hungary, Central and Eastern Europe) and Arabic (Lebanon, Syria and Palestine) peoples, proof of this phenomenon of immigration from Europe and to a lesser extent, Jewish and Arabic are the various clubs, schools, and sections of the city of Temuco. There are East Asian colonies of Chinese, Japanese and Koreans in Temuco, dating back to the end of the Korean War in the 1950s when thousands of Korean refugees settled through U.N. relocation programs to Chile.
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