Page "Pedro de Valdivia" Paragraph 30

Yet another contemporary chronicler, Pedro Mariño de Lobera, also wrote that Valdivia offered to evacuate the lands of the Mapuche but says he was shortly thereafter killed with a large club by a vengeful warrior named Pilmaiquen, who said that Valdivia could not be trusted to keep his word once freed.

Lobera also says that a common story in Chile at the time was that Valdivia had been killed by forcing him to drink molten gold.

According to an even later legend, Lautaro took Valdivia to the Mapuche camp and put him to death after three days of torture, extracting his beating heart and eating it with the Mapuche leaders.

The fact remains that probably all the stories about his death are apocryphal, since none of Valdivia's party survived the battle, and the only witnesses that could be found were Indians that were captured in subsequent battles.