Festival Reino Fungi Returns to Southern Chile for Its Fifth Edition with a Focus on Decomposition
- Marc Violo
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
Festival Reino Fungi 2026 takes place in Pucón, Chile, from 30 April to 3 May, bringing together scientists, artists, entrepreneurs and local communities around the theme of decomposition as a force for regeneration.
The fifth edition builds on the 2025 event, which drew more than 10,000 attendees, and expands its international reach with speakers from Argentina, Colombia and beyond.
The festival frames fungal intelligence as a model for rethinking innovation, culture and territorial development in an era of ecological and social transformation.
Celebrating Decomposition
There is something quietly radical about choosing decomposition as the central theme of a public festival. For most people, the word conjures endings — rot, decline, dissolution. Festival Reino Fungi takes the opposite view. Its 2026 edition, the fifth, positions decomposition as one of nature's most generative processes: the mechanism by which fungi and other organisms break down complex matter into simpler components, releasing nutrients and enabling new growth. In ecosystems, nothing regenerates without it.
Taking place in Pucón, a town nestled in the Araucanía region of southern Chile from 30 April to 3 May 2026, the festival occupies a landscape that makes the point visually and ecologically. The temperate forests of the region host extraordinary fungal diversity, making the setting as much a part of the argument as the programme itself.
Science, Art and Territory in Dialogue
The four-day event organises its programme around five thematic pillars: Territory, Knowledge, Networks, Art and the Fungi Market. These strands span conferences, public forums, artistic experiences, educational activities and professional networking sessions — a deliberate attempt to bridge the gap between specialist research and broader public engagement.
The 2026 speaker line-up reflects the festival's growing international ambitions. Marc Violo, founder of MycoStories, Giuliana Furci, field mycologist and founder of Fundación Fungi — the world's first organisation dedicated exclusively to fungal conservation — will participate, continuing a sustained collaboration between the two organisations. Carolina Zimet, director of Panambí Ventures in Argentina, brings a focus on mental health and innovation, whilst Diego Cifuentes, who manages the Creative Industries Technology Cluster in Medellín, Colombia, adds a perspective on how nature-inspired thinking connects to urban and economic development.
The festival's framing of innovation is worth noting. Rather than treating it as a purely technological or commercial category, the organisers understand innovation as a systemic capacity — the ability to reorganise relationships, activate networks and translate knowledge across contexts. It is, in effect, an ecological metaphor applied to human systems. As grassroots fungal enterprise has demonstrated across the Global South, this kind of thinking is gaining traction well beyond academic circles.
A Growing Platform for Fungal Culture
The 2025 edition attracted more than 10,000 visitors, consolidating the festival's status as one of Chile's most significant interdisciplinary gatherings at the intersection of biodiversity, health and creative economies. The 2026 programme deepens that trajectory, widening its international reach whilst remaining grounded in the ecology and communities of southern Chile.
In a broader landscape where fungal innovation is increasingly attracting formal recognition and support, Festival Reino Fungi occupies a distinctive position: less a showcase of products than a space for thinking. It asks what living systems — and the fungi that sustain them — can teach us about how to organise knowledge, culture and economic life. The answer, if the programme is any guide, is rather a lot.
