The strip of territory which currently makes up Chile has been the target of four of the ten strongest earthquakes in the recorded history of the world, one of them striking the then Peruvian town of Arica in the afternoon of 13th August, 1868. Arica had by then already been served for over a decade by a railway linking it to the neighboring town of Tacna. In spite of its strength, the damage caused in Arica by the earthquake itself, although severe in the absolute sense, was light relative to that due to the devastating series of tsunamis that it triggered. The Arica & Tacna Railway Co. Ltd. then owned five locomotives, at least four of which were lost because of the tsunamis.
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