Who ruled Santiago?

Santiago lies in a broad basin in the middle of Chile, walled in by the high Andes to the east and a lower coastal range to the west, with the Mapocho River running through it. The valley offered water, mild winters and good farmland, which is why Spanish conquistadors chose it as the seat of their new colony in 1541. Two forces have shaped the city ever since: its role as the political centre of a long, thin country, and the earthquakes that have repeatedly knocked it down.

People lived in the basin for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived, farming maize and beans along the river. In the late 1400s the valley came within the southern reach of the Inca Empire, which built roads and administrative posts here, though Inca control thinned out further south, where Mapuche communities kept their independence.

On 12 February 1541 Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago del Nuevo Extremo at the foot of a rocky hill the locals called Huelén and he renamed Santa Lucía. A grid of blocks was laid out around a central square, today's Plaza de Armas. Only seven months later, on 11 September 1541, a force of Indigenous warriors led by the chief Michimalonco burned the settlement almost to the ground while Valdivia was away. The survivors rebuilt, but for decades Santiago was a poor outpost, harried by the long Arauco War with the Mapuche to the south.

Chile was governed as a captaincy general under the Viceroyalty of Peru, which explains why the site's maps show Santiago inside that larger unit. The royal court of justice settled permanently in Santiago in 1607, confirming it as the colony's capital. Floods from the Mapocho, epidemics and earthquakes punctuated colonial life; the quake of 13 May 1647 killed several hundred people and brought down much of the town. By the 1700s Santiago had become a modest but solid centre of churches, convents and adobe houses, its elite drawing wealth from cattle, wheat and silver.

In September 1810 a junta of local notables took power in Santiago, beginning the struggle for independence. Royalist forces returned in 1814, but in 1817 the Army of the Andes under José de San Martín and Bernardo O'Higgins crossed the mountains, won at Chacabuco and entered the city. Independence was formally declared in February 1818, and the decisive victory came at Maipú, just outside Santiago, on 5 April 1818. The map's switch to Chile in 1878 therefore lags the real date by six decades; see the Spanish American wars of independence for the wider story.

As capital of the new republic, Santiago grew on the profits of mining and trade. A railway linked it to the port of Valparaíso in 1863, and the mayor Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna remodelled the centre in the 1870s, turning Santa Lucía hill into a landscaped park. A fire in the Church of the Company of Jesus in December 1863 killed more than 2,000 people, one of the worst disasters in the city's history. In the twentieth century migrants from the countryside and the collapsing nitrate mines of the north swelled the population past one million by about 1940.

On 11 September 1973 the armed forces bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace, in the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power. Military rule lasted until 1990. Since then Santiago has expanded rapidly, gaining a large metro network and a business district of towers, while mass protests in 2019 and 2020 exposed deep inequality. Greater Santiago is home to roughly seven million people, about a third of Chile's population, and remains the country's political, financial and cultural centre.