Hola,

by now you probably realised what your problem was, but to give a more general answer: perl handling of encoding is not as transparent as it could be, to keep backwards compatibility; but as long as you specify the right codification for all the links the chain, (e.g. your input, output, and output viewer --your terminal must have the proper locale, your text editor or browser must know the proper encoding), the chain won't break... often. Today, that usually means "set everything to UTF-8," though many programs haven't kept with the times.

For a gentle introduction to encoding, check perlunitut and perlunifaq. Also, "use diagnostics;" will provide clear help to many common mistakes; more than recommended when you're starting.