Sara Braun was born in 1862 in Talsen, in Courland, today Talsi in Latvia. Her Jewish family left the Russian Empire and reached Punta Arenas in 1874, when she was twelve. In 1887 she married José Nogueira, the Portuguese sealer who had become the richest man in the colony. He died of tuberculosis in 1893 and left her, at 31, ships, stores and a lease on about a million hectares of Tierra del Fuego.
The Museo Regional calls her the only businesswoman in Punta Arenas. That same year, 1893, she and her brother Mauricio set up the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, the biggest sheep company in Patagonia. Memoria Chilena, citing Chile's 2008 Historical Truth Commission report, notes that the company was accused of leading a massacre of the Selk'nam, whose land the sheep took.
She spent part of the fortune on the town. Her palace on Plaza Muñoz Gamero, commissioned in 1895 from the French architect Numa Mayer, is now a hotel and the Club de la Unión. She gave the cemetery its grand portico, land for schools and help to the Red Cross. She died in Viña del Mar in 1955, aged 92, and is buried in that cemetery, which now bears her name.
