Famous Landmarks in Santiago
Santiago pairs its cathedral, mint and Beaux-Arts palace with a colonial grid from 1541.
Santiago's oldest landmarks cluster within the colonial grid Pedro de Valdivia laid around the Plaza de Armas, on a basin floor between the Andes and the Chilean Coastal Range. A cathedral rebuilt across a century and a half faces the square directly; a few blocks away, a former mint turned presidential palace and a Beaux-Arts fine-arts museum extend the same neoclassical vocabulary into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. None of the three went up in a single campaign: earthquakes, fires and long construction schedules repeatedly interrupted work, so each building layers later design over earlier foundations. Stone and stucco facades, colonnades and low domes dominate, a legacy of colonial and republican-era Chilean architects working within a grid that has held since 1541.
Santiago Metropolitan Cathedral
1748–1906 · Joaquín Toesca
A pale stone neoclassical facade with paired columns and twin bell towers fills one side of a large colonial square, fronted by an archbishop's palace and a smaller parish chapel.
The cathedral is the seat of the Archdiocese of Santiago and the main Catholic temple in the country, dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It stands opposite the Plaza de Armas as part of an ensemble with the Archbishop's Palace and the Parish del Sagrario. The building seen today is the fifth raised on the site, constructed between 1748 and 1906 to designs begun by Joaquín Toesca and carried through by Ignacio Cremonesi.
Photo: Cadres.g (CC BY-SA 3.0)
La Moneda Palace
1805 · Gioacchino Toesca
A long, low neoclassical block with a colonnaded facade and an interior courtyard occupies an entire block of the civic district, its stone front broken by regular arched windows rather than any single dominant entrance.
Originally built as the royal mint, the palace now serves as the seat of the president of Chile and houses the offices of three cabinet ministries: Interior, the General Secretariat of the Presidency, and the General Secretariat of Government. It occupies a full block in Santiago's Civic District, bordered by Moneda, Morandé, Alameda and Teatinos streets. The architect, Gioacchino Toesca, died in 1799, before the building was completed.
Photo: Miguel hernandez (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts
1910 · Emile Jéquier
A Beaux-Arts palace with a glazed central dome and a symmetrical stone facade stands within a riverside park, its light-filled interior built around a large sculpture-lined gallery beneath the dome.
The museum is one of the principal centres for Chilean and South American art, run by the Artistic Union. The institution itself was established in 1880, making it the oldest of its kind in South America, but the Palace of Fine Arts that now houses it dates to 1910, built to a design by the Chilean architect Emile Jéquier for the centennial of Chilean independence. It stands in the Parque Forestal, behind the University of Chile's Museum of Contemporary Art.
- The museum's collection predates its own building by three decades: the institution was founded in 1880, thirty years before the palace it now occupies.
Photo: Carlos Figueroa Rojas (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Plaza de Armas
1541 · Pedro de Gamboa
A large paved plaza bordered by a stone cathedral with twin bell towers, a domed neoclassical post office building and an arcaded shopping gallery, its center marked by a white marble statue of a woman breaking chains beside a bronze equestrian statue.
The Plaza de Armas is Santiago's main square, laid out on a grid designed by the architect Pedro de Gamboa around the city's 1541 founding, with a metro station running beneath it. A Carrara marble monument depicting an allegory of freedom, carved by Francesco Orselino, stands at its center; it replaced an earlier 1671 bronze fountain now kept at La Moneda Palace. The square once hosted markets in surrounding arcades and a gallows for public executions. Declared a national monument in 1986, it is framed today by the cathedral, the Central Post Office and the Portal Fernández Concha arcade.
- Researchers have argued that an Inca settlement once occupied the ground beneath the square, its infrastructure later reused to found the city.
- The bronze fountain the marble freedom monument replaced was not destroyed; it was moved to La Moneda Palace, where it remains.
- The streets around the cathedral are informally nicknamed "Little Lima" for the Peruvian immigrants and businesses long settled there.
Photo: Dan Lundberg (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Municipal Theatre of Santiago
1857–1873 · François Brunet de Baines
A neoclassical building with a colonnaded stone facade opens onto an ornate main hall lit by a crystal chandelier, its interior and stage curtain repeatedly renewed after fires and an earthquake yet still staging opera, ballet and orchestral performances under one roof.
The Municipal Theatre is Santiago's principal opera house and the National Opera of Chile, commissioned by presidential decree in 1853 and designed by François Brunet de Baines in a French Neoclassical style. It opened in 1857 with Verdi's Ernani, but a fire following an 1870 performance destroyed most of the building; it reopened, rebuilt by Lucien Hénault, in 1873. A 1906 earthquake and a 1927 fire each damaged the theatre again, though it recovered both times. Declared a national historical monument in 1974, it now houses a philharmonic orchestra, ballet company and chorus.
- Its 1995 replacement stage curtain was funded partly by selling pieces of the old one to donors as keepsakes.
- Pianist Claudio Arrau, who had left Chile in 1941, returned in 1984 for the opening of a 250-seat hall named after him inside the theatre.
- The original design benefited from input by Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opera.
Photo: Felipe Restrepo Acosta (CC BY-SA 4.0)
History
Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago del Nuevo Extremo on 12 February 1541, laying a grid plan around the Plaza Mayor, now the Plaza de Armas. Despite Indigenous attacks, floods and earthquakes, notably in 1647, the settlement consolidated as the capital of the Captaincy General of Chile. The cathedral fronting the square was rebuilt through a succession of predecessor structures between 1748 and 1906, the fifth church to occupy that ground. The colonial mint on Alameda, later the seat of government, went up under the same neoclassical influence that shaped the cathedral. By the early twentieth century Santiago was adding to its civic core again, raising a Beaux-Arts palace for the fine arts in 1910 to mark the centenary of independence, on ground now within the Parque Forestal.