In 'The House of the Spirits', which character has the gift of foresight?

In 'The House of the Spirits', Clara del Valle has the gift of foresight. From childhood, Clara displays clairvoyant and telekinetic abilities, and her predictions become one of the novel's central supernatural threads.

Clara foresees an accidental death in her family, and her prediction is followed by the poisoning of her sister Rosa. The shock of Rosa's death causes Clara to stop speaking for several years, but it does not end her connection to the supernatural. She later predicts events in the lives of her relatives, communicates with spirits, and records her experiences in detailed notebooks.

Clara's powers help shape the novel's structure because her journals preserve family history across generations. Her daughter Blanca and granddaughter Alba inherit the family story, but neither is the principal clairvoyant figure. Alba becomes crucial to the novel's political and emotional resolution, while Esteban Trueba is a forceful landowner and politician rather than a seer. Clara's supernatural gifts are treated as part of ordinary family life, a defining feature of Isabel Allende's magical-realist style.