Arab Chileans
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (Over 800,000) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Valparaíso, La Serena, Santiago | |
| Languages | |
| Chilean Spanish, Arabic | |
| Religion | |
|
Eastern Orthodoxy · Catholicism, with Sunni Islam |
|
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians |
Arab Chileans are immigrants to Chile from the Arab world. Most are Christian and are the descendants of economic migrants from Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, who arrived in Chile in the mid-19th to early-20th centuries. Ethnically Arab Chileans are often called "Turks", (Spanish: Turcos) a term believed to derive from the fact that they arrived from the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Most arrived as members of the Eastern Orthodox church, but a minority became Roman Catholic. A minority are Muslim.
It is estimated that 800,000 Chileans of the population is of Arab origin, chiefly descendants of immigrants from the Middle East (i.e. Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and Middle East Armenians).Chile is home to a large population of immigrants, mostly Christian, from the Levant. Roughly 500,000 Palestinian descendants are believed to reside in Chile. And the effects of their migration are widely visible. The earliest such migrants came in the 1850s, with others arriving during World War I and later the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The Club Palestino is one of the most prestigious social clubs in Santiago. They are believed to form the largest Palestinian community outside of the Arab world. Aside from these migrants of previous decades, Chile has also taken in some Palestinian refugees in later years, as in April 2008 when they received 117 from the Al-Waleed refugee camp on the Syria–Iraq border near the Al-Tanf crossing. The situation in Gaza has caused tensions even thousands of miles away between the Israeli and Palestinian communities in Chile.
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Wikipedia