Santiago has been flattened by earthquakes, rebuilt in adobe and Glasgow iron, and torn open by the 1973 coup. Three days trace the city from pre-Columbian Andean cultures through colonial cloisters to Londres 38 and the wall of 4,000 names.
Santiago's oldest surviving building: the 1586 church raised around the Virgen del Socorro that Pedro de Valdivia carried on his saddle in 1541. The cloister museum holds 54 canvases of St Francis painted in Cusco in 1684.
Ten thousand years of Andean and Amazonian cultures inside the 1805 Real Aduana building: Chinchorro mummies from Arica older than any in Egypt, Moche portrait pottery and towering Mapuche chemamüll grave posts.
The fifth cathedral built on this corner, finished around 1800 to Joaquín Toesca's design after successive earthquakes flattened its predecessors. The crypt holds Chile's archbishops and the heart of statesman Diego Portales.
Begun in 1747 in pink stone quarried from Cerro Blanco, its twin towers deliberately cut short after the 1730 and 1751 quakes taught Santiago's builders humility. Inside sits the 1785 Virgen del Rosario and a 19th-century German organ.
Chile's reckoning with 1973–1990: three storeys of photographs of the disappeared, testimony from Villa Grimaldi and other torture centres, and the recording of Allende's last radio address from La Moneda on 11 September 1973.
A neoclassical townhouse the DINA secret police ran as a clandestine detention centre from 1973 to 1975; 98 people brought here were killed or disappeared. Cobblestones outside are inscribed with their names. Free entry, Tuesday to Friday.
Chile's necropolis since 1821, with roughly two million burials including Salvador Allende and twenty presidents. The Memorial del Detenido Desaparecido carries some 4,000 names, and Patio 29's iron crosses marked unidentified 1973 victims.
The covered arena where thousands of prisoners were held in September 1973 and where the singer Víctor Jara was tortured and shot. Renamed for him in 2003, it keeps a memorial wall and the verses he wrote in the stands during his last days.
Santiago's oldest surviving residential quarter, laid out in 1839 and named for a battlefield victory in Peru. Adobe-and-tile houses, the Roto Chileno monument on Plaza Yungay, and Peluquería Francesa, a barbershop trading since 1868.
Wrought iron cast in Glasgow, shipped in pieces and bolted together for the 1872 opening. Fermín Vivaceta's roof still shelters fishmongers selling congrio and erizos, and Donde Augusto has cooked in the central nave since 1922.
Neruda's 1953 hillside house, built in secret for Matilde Urrutia and ransacked days after the coup; his wake was held here in 1973 among broken glass and flooded rooms. Boat-shaped spaces, ships' figureheads and coloured glass throughout.
Emilio Jéquier's 1913 terminus, its iron frame shipped from Belgium, dispatched trains north to Calera and Valparaíso until 1987. Closed after earthquake damage, it reopened as a cultural centre with the 100-metre barrel vault intact.