Santiago

Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago del Nuevo Extremo on 12 February 1541 beside the hill now called Santa Lucía, naming it after the apostle James and his own home region of Extremadura and laying out a grid around a Plaza Mayor that is now the Plaza de Armas. Within months, on 11 September 1541, a coalition of Mapuche and Picunche led by Michimalonco destroyed the settlement. It was rebuilt, but floods of the Mapocho River, a smallpox epidemic in 1575 and earthquakes, above all that of 13 May 1647, which killed more than 600 people, slowed its growth. The Royal Court was finally established here in 1607, confirming Santiago as the colonial capital.

After independence the city grew into a republican capital: the University of Chile and the Quinta Normal were founded, the old royal mint of La Moneda became the seat of government in the 1840s, and the population rose from about 46,000 in 1820 to about 115,000 by 1865 and more than 500,000 by 1920. The wealthy moved east to Providencia and Ñuñoa, and between 1940 and 1960 migrants from the countryside swelled the city. The metro opened its first line under the Alameda in 1975.

On 11 September 1973 La Moneda was attacked with tanks and bombed from the air during the coup in which President Allende died, and the dictatorship used sites such as the National Stadium and Villa Grimaldi for detention and torture. Earthquakes struck again in 1985 and 2010. In October 2019 protests over a metro fare rise grew into mass demonstrations about inequality; voters then approved writing a new constitution in 2020, but rejected the drafts in 2022 and 2023. The city hosted the Pan American Games in 2023.

Santiago sets Chile's national tone: its fast, slangy Spanish, its media and its politics. A sharp divide between the wealthy eastern districts of the Barrio Alto and the working-class communes of the south and west is seen by many Chileans as the country's inequality in miniature. Few colonial buildings survive, because earthquakes have repeatedly damaged the city, but the centre keeps its cathedral, the church of San Francisco and grand 19th-century buildings such as the Municipal Theatre, the Central Station and the Mercado Central.

The city's cultural life ranges from the National Museum of Fine Arts, the oldest in South America, to the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral, opened in 2010, and the theatres and cinemas of Lastarria. Bellavista, where Pablo Neruda built La Chascona, is the bohemian quarter, with jazz clubs, galleries and bars, while the oldest jazz club, the Club de Jazz de Santiago, is in Ñuñoa. Lollapalooza has been held in Santiago since 2011, its first edition outside the United States.

Football divides the city between Colo-Colo, founded in 1925 and in the top division without a break since 1933, and Universidad de Chile, with Universidad Católica, founded in 1937, the third big club. The Fiestas Patrias in September fill the parks with fondas, cueca dancing and barbecues. Memory of the dictatorship remains present, in museums, memorials and the annual commemorations of the 1973 coup.

The commune of Santiago, the historic core, had 438,856 inhabitants at the 2024 census, but the city most people mean is Greater Santiago, a conurbation of more than forty communes that holds over a third of Chile's population and produces around 45 per cent of its GDP. It has no single metropolitan government; communes, an elected regional governor and an appointed presidential delegate share responsibility. Immigration has transformed the centre: in 2024 about 40 per cent of the commune's residents were born abroad, mostly in other South American countries.

The capital concentrates finance, government, universities and services. Its business district of glass towers stretches east through Providencia and Las Condes, where many companies moved from the old centre. Many residents live in large communes such as Puente Alto, Maipú and La Florida, and commute by metro and bus. Cycling has grown fast, from about 4 per cent of trips in 2012 to nearly 8 per cent in 2023.

Daily life is shaped by distance and the seasons: long commutes, a substantial lunch, and weekends at the coast or in the mountains. Winter smog, the cost of housing and crime are among the issues most discussed.

The markets set the menu. In the Mercado Central, under its Scottish cast-iron roof, seafood restaurants serve caldillo de congrio, a conger-eel soup that Neruda praised in an ode, alongside other fish and seafood, while La Vega Central, across the river, sells the Central Valley's fruit and vegetables and cheap lunches to traders.

Santiago is a city of sandwiches and street food. The Barros Luco, beef with melted cheese, is named after a president; the chacarero adds green beans, tomato and chilli to the beef. The completo is the Chilean hot dog, usually piled with toppings such as chopped tomato, avocado, mayonnaise and sauerkraut. Street carts sell sopaipillas, fried dough that in central Chile includes pumpkin, and mote con huesillo, a sweet drink of dried peaches and husked wheat.

The terremoto, or earthquake, is the capital's own drink: pipeño wine with pineapple ice cream and grenadine, said to have been invented after the 1985 earthquake and popularised by bars such as La Piojera. A smaller second glass is called a réplica, an aftershock. Wine from the Maipo valley, at the city's edge, is known for Cabernet Sauvignon, and Barrio Italia and Bellavista offer food from across Latin America and the world.