In Praise of Santiago de Chile

Events of the past few days in Chile have compelled me to revisit this post I started a while ago but never finished. (I started writing this in early February and now it is the first day of March.) As I scan the news, I realize with sadness that many of the beaux-arts buildings I mention about below were damaged, some severely. But my post has nothing to do with the earthquake. Instead, it is about my impressions of a city I have recently grown to care for very much, as it appeared to me in happier times.

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If Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America, the austral City of Lights, then I like to think of Santiago as the southern hemispheric Nice or, to stretch a point, Barcelona.

To me Santiago de Chile is a like a Mediterranean city which eclipsed by the boulevards and architectural glories of the capital city in Paris (or Madrid), nevertheless possesses its own, more relaxed charm, benefiting from better weather, brighter light, and a spectacular natural setting. So, while Santiago may be overshadowed by the romance, the reputation, and the sheer size of its sister capital on the other side of the Andes it is well worth a visit by anyone thinking about a trip to South America.

To the first-time visitor, Santiago de Chile seems more European than Latin with wide, tree-lined boulevards and gently curving modernist apartment buildings. Bike-lanes crisscross the city and leafy parks are seemingly everywhere. The confident Santiagoans take ample advantage of both. At rush hour, young women race to work on bicycles, their skirts billowing behind and in the parks, the crisp Mediterranean summer sun is filtered by the leaves and lovers, oblivious to the gawking pedestrians, embrace on shade-darkened lawns.

My favorite of the parks is Bustamante, a wide strip of peace between two boulevards not far from the commercial center of town. Here I first discovered the joys of the cafe literario. A relatively new phenomenon in Santiago, these are city libraries that double as internet cafes. They are extremely popular. In Parque Bustamante, the cafe literario is an airy, two-story glass and concrete structure whose lines are mirrored and elongated by a reflecting pool (see right, in a nice night-time picture). The ground floor -- where eager cafe customers jostle for the rare unoccupied seat -- is entirely open to the breezes. From there, the vista is one of silver water reflecting blue sky and a ring of green all around. The effect is idyllic.

Santiago does not have an old colonial center like many other Latin capitals. What it does have, however, is a wealth of beaux-arts and Modernist buildings. It is as if in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city tried to make up for its deficit of memorials to the distant past by an enthusiastic embrace of the contemporary. At the end of the 19th century it was the beaux-arts movement that held sway in the city. Chile's leading families and the capitalists, newly rich from the copper and nitrite mines in the north, poured their money into urban palaces. Today, these ornate structures, heavy with cornices and statuary and imposing arches and lintels point to a desire for bourgeois respectibility in a country attempting to show itself and its new wealth to the world.

One of my favorite neighborhoods, downtown, near the Universidad de Chile, is composed entirely of beaux-arts buildings. Narrow cobble-stone streets wind through Paris-Londres, as the neighborhood is called. It is named after the two main streets. Car traffic is rare in Paris-Londres and students and tourists generally stroll down the middle of the streets, the better to admire the stately buildings on either side.

As Modernism was sweeping Europe in the early decades of the last century Santiago, not to be outdone, abandoned the beaux-arts and rushed to embrace the new style of construction. Heavy ornamentation was left behind in favor of Modernism's clean, curving concrete forms and corner-wrapping windows. To the lover of this style of architecture, Santiago is endlessly fascinating. Entire city blocks were built in the 30s and 40s and the mechanicalinear lines of those blocks have been pleasantly softened over the years by rows of stately trees.

Today, Santiago is a bustling, contemporary city of five million people. It is also surprisingly efficient. To the traveler who arrives directly from another South American city it is this efficiency that may be the most striking sign of Santiago's difference, of its non-Latin character. Where other regional cities -- Mexico, Quito, Guatemala -- are terrifying for pedestrians, in Santiago the automobile, at least in the urban core, seems an afterthought. A web of pedestrian malls make strolling downtown a joy. Outdoor cafes fill these streets and compete with ice-cream vendors, newsstands, and shoeshines for attention. And even where there is traffic, the pedestrian reigns supreme. Unlike in many other Latin cities, drivers in Santiago strictly obey the traffic lights and are scrupulous about stopping for pedestrians.

One warm summer day, while sauntering beneath the trees along one of these walking streets I came across a large crowd. About fifty or more people were standing in a rough circle, chattering excitedly, and point their arms upwards. I immediately thought there must be a jumper on a ledge and scanned the rooftops with excitement and dread. I soon realized my gaze had gone too high, however. The crowd was looking not to the buildings, but rather to a tree just in front. There, on a branch halfway up the tree an owl was perched. It was large, tranquil, and seemingly very much in its element, oblivious to the stir it had created in the crowd below. I was amazed. Hours later I passed the spot again. The owl was still there.

Santiago has the most efficient public transit system in Latin America. Its subway is a thing of beauty and the people are justifiably very proud of it. Trains are frequent, clean and crowded. They are so crowded in fact that during rush hour you generally have to let one or two trains pass before one comes along with enough room to squeeze in. But, they come with such frequency that I can't recall ever waiting longer than two or three minutes between trains. The subway was started in the years of the military dictatorship in Chile but its expansion continues today with several new stations opening every year (see left).

Skyscrapers have sprouted up in new neighborhoods that threaten to pull business away from the central core. I met several residents who admitted to seldom visiting the old downtown anymore. Their loss, I thought, but the movement to the taller neighborhoods may, sadly, be inevitable. Paradoxically, it is these new skyscrapers, with their tendency to draw the eye upwards, that serves to remind Santiagoans of the most powerful aspect of their urban environment, the mountains.

Santiago is a city surrounded by the high Andes. And on days when the smog has lifted, the white-topped mountains look so close, so bold as to appear unreal, like a stage set built behind the city as if to remind us that no matter how high we strive, no matter how tall the skyscrapers become, nature can always do better.