Cuchillos Artesanales Llaima (Roberto Alarcón)

Roberto Alarcón Navarrete is a primary-school teacher in Melipeuco, in Chile's Araucanía region — currently director of Escuela N°10 Llaima, with 35 years in that town and 38 years in teaching overall — who took up knifemaking as a craft and now runs it as a named side business, Cuchillos Artesanales Llaima. A Melipeuco-focused local news portal and the town's own municipal government, which has featured his work in interview segments, both independently document his name, profession and craft rather than relying on his own marketing copy alone.

Alarcón forges blades from recycled carbon steel — car leaf springs and worn agricultural tools — and fits handles from araucaria (monkey-puzzle) offcuts, naturally shed deer antler, and scraps of apple, pellín, luma and raulí wood, with inlay work in volcanic stone, alpaca, silver and bronze. Coverage states he received Chile's Sello de Excelencia a la Artesanía, a government craft-recognition program, and that his knives are sold by direct order through Instagram rather than an open storefront, priced from roughly 40,000 pesos.

This is a genuinely small, single-artisan operation without a dedicated commercial website, verified here through independent local journalism and municipal government coverage rather than self-published claims — a meaningfully different evidence bar than the tourist-market "traditional artisan" listings this category is prone to. It is included on that basis, with the explicit caveat that ordering is direct-to-maker via social media, not a conventional e-commerce checkout.