Explore Santiago and around
Officially the Avenida del Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins, Santiago’s most vital east–west artery is universally known as the Alameda, a poplar-lined avenue used for strolling and recreation, and found in many Latin American cities. This one began life as La Cañada (or “channel”), when a branch of the Mapocho was sealed off shortly before independence, and a roadway was created over the old riverbed. A few years later, when the Supreme Director Bernardo O’Higgins decided that Santiago required an alameda, La Cañada was deemed the best place to put it: “There is no public boulevard where people may get together for honest relief and amusement during the resting hours, since the one known as Tajamar, because of its narrowness and irregularity, far from being cheerful, inspires sadness. La Cañada, because of its condition, extension, abundance of water and other circumstances, is the most apparent place for an alameda.” Three rows of poplars were promptly planted along each side, and the Alameda was born, soon to become the place to take the evening promenade.
Since those quieter times the boulevard has evolved into the city’s biggest, busiest, noisiest and most polluted thoroughfare. Still, it’s an unavoidable axis and you’ll probably spend a fair bit of time on it or under it: the main metro line runs beneath it, and some of Santiago’s most interesting landmarks stand along it.
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Cerro Santa Lucía
Cerro Santa Lucía
The lushly forested Cerro Santa Lucía is Santiago’s most imaginative and exuberant piece of landscaping. Looking at it now, it’s hard to believe that for the first three centuries of the city’s development this was nothing more than a barren, rocky outcrop, completely ignored despite its historical importance – it was at the foot of this hill that Santiago was officially founded by Valdivia, on February 12, 1541. It wasn’t until 1872 that the city turned its attention to Santa Lucía once more, when the mayor of Santiago, Vicuña Mackenna, enlisted the labour of 150 prisoners to transform it into a grand public park.
Quasi-Gaudíesque in appearance, with swirling pathways and Baroque terraces and turrets, this is a great place to come for panoramic views across the city. If slogging up the steps doesn’t appeal, use the free lift on the western side of the park, by the junction with Huérfanos. While it’s always busy and safe by day, muggings have been reported in the Cerro Santa Lucía after dark.
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Iglesia San Francisco
Iglesia San Francisco
You can’t miss the Iglesia San Francisco, with its towering red walls jutting out into the street. This is Santiago’s oldest building, erected between 1586 and 1628. Take a look inside at the Virgen del Socorro, a small polychrome carving (rather lost in the vast main altar) brought to Chile on the saddle of Pedro de Valdivia in 1540 and credited with guiding him on his way, as well as fending off Indian attackers by throwing sand in their eyes. For all its age and beauty, the most remarkable feature of this church is its deep, hushed silence; you’re just metres from the din of the Alameda but the traffic seems a million miles away.
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Museo Colonial
Museo Colonial
The monastery adjacent to the Iglesia San Francisco houses the Museo Colonial, which has a highly evocative collection of paintings, sculpture, furniture, keys and other objects dating from the colonial period, most of it religious and a good deal of it created in Peru, the seat of colonial government. Note the immense eighteenth-century cedar door of the first room you come to off the cloisters; carved into hundreds of intricately designed squares, this is one of the museum’s most beautiful possessions. Inside the room, you’ll find another arresting sight: a gigantic painting of the genealogical tree of the Franciscan Order consisting of 644 miniature portraits.
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Palacios of the Alameda
Palacios of the Alameda
Walk west along the Alameda and you enter what was once the preserve of Santiago’s moneyed elite, with several glorious mansions built around 1900 serving as reminders. The first to look out for is the French-style Palacio Irarrázaval, on the south side of the Alameda between San Ignacio and Dieciocho; built in 1906 by Cruz Montt, it now houses an old-fashioned restaurant. Adjoining it at the corner of Dieciocho, the slightly later and more ornate Edificio Iñíguez, by the same architect in league with Larraín Bravo, houses Confitería Torres, said to be where the “national” sandwich, the Barros Luco, was invented in honour of a leading politician.
Then check out the 1917 Palacio Ariztía, headquarters in Santiago for the nation’s deputies, a little further on in the next block; a fine copy of an Art Nouveau French mansion, again by Cruz Montt, it is set off by an iron-and-glass door canopy. Next door, the late-nineteenth-century Palacio Errázuriz, the oldest and finest of these Alameda mansions, is now the Brazilian Embassy. Built for Maximiano Errázuriz, mining mogul and leading socialite, it is a soberly elegant two-storey building in a Neoclassical style – the architect was Italian Eusebio Chelli. You’re now standing opposite the triumphant Monumento a los Héroes de la Concepción, an imposing statue which borders the junction of the Alameda with the Avenida Norte Sur (the Panamericana); this is where metro Lines #1 and #2 intersect at Los Héroes station.
