In 1918 a 28-year-old teacher, Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, came to Punta Arenas to run the Liceo de Niñas, the state girls' secondary school. A ministry report rated it the worst of Chile's 44 state liceos. The minister Pedro Aguirre Cerda had recommended her, and she already wrote as Gabriela Mistral: in 1914 her "Sonnets of Death" had won the Juegos Florales poetry prize in Santiago.
She raised enrolment, reorganised the school, and taught night classes for workers and working women at the Sociedad de Instrucción Popular on Avenida Colón. She founded a public library and was behind "Mireya", the first art and literature magazine in the far south. With her pupils she planted trees along Avenida Colón.
Magallanes went into her first book. Much of "Desolación", published in New York in 1922, was written at the Hotel Tres Pasos in Última Esperanza, and it includes the cycle "Paisajes de la Patagonia". She left in April 1920 for Temuco. In 1945 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Latin American to do so.
Her trace is at the Liceo Sara Braun on Avenida Colón: a ten-metre-high ceramic mural from 2007, a 2022 mural of her face, and the Gabriela Mistral Pavilion, which keeps the furniture and objects she used, declared a Historic Monument.