Santiago
city church national school
SANTIAGO, the capital of Chili, and the chief town of a province of its own name (now 5223 square miles in extent, reduced in 1883 by the formation of the new province of O'Higgins), is situated in 33° 26' 42" S. lat. and 70° 40' 36" W. long., at a height of about 1830 feet above the sea, in a wide
and beautiful plain between the main range of the Andes and the less elevated heights of Cuesta del Prado, 115 miles east of Valparaiso by rail. In the centre of the city rises the rocky hill of Santa Lucia, with its two fortresses, - recently converted into a pleasure-ground, with theatres, restaurants, and monuments; and immediately to the north-north-west and north-east are
those known as Colina, Renca, and San Crist6bal. The snow-clad range of the Andes, in which the summits of La Chapa and Los Amarillos are conspicuous, is visible from Santiago. A turbid mountain stream, the Mapocho, flows west through the heart of the city to join the Celina and ultimately the Mali"' or Maipo ; its floods were sometimes, as in 1609 and 1783, the cause of great damage till the
construction of a solid embankment was undertaken under the government of Ambrosio O'Higgins; it is now crossed by several handsome bridges, the oldest of which, a structure of eleven arches, dates from 1767-1779. From the very first Santiago was laid out with great regularity in parallelograms ; but owing to the frequency of earthquakes the dwelling-houses are seldom built of more than a single
story in height. The cathedral, situated in the Plaza de la Independencia, is the oldest of the churches. Originally erected, by Pedro Valdivia and rebuilt by Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, it was destroyed by the earthquake of 1647 and rebuilt on a new plan subsequent to 1748. It is 351 feet long by 92 feet wide, but has no very striking features. Among the other ecclesiastical buildings are the
church of San Agustin, erected in 1595 by Cristobal de Vera and in modern times adorned with a pillared portico ; the churches of San Francisco, La Merced, and Santo Domingo, dating from the 18th century ; the Augustine nunnery founded by Bishop Medellin in 1576; the Carmen Alto, or church of the Carmelite nunnery, an elegant little Gothic building ; the stately church of the Reformed Dominicans,
rich in marble monolithic columns ; and the chapel erected in 1852 to the memory of Pedro Valdivia next to the house in which he is reputed to have lived. The public cemetery, recently secularized, has a large number of marble and bronze monuments, - mostly from Italy. Among the secular buildings the more noteworthy are the palace of the intendency, the old presidential palace (popularly Las
Cajas), the congress buildings, the mint, the palace of justice, the municipal theatre. The present university of Santiago dates from 1842, - the older Huiversidad de San Felipe, which had been established in 1747, having been closed in 1839. It occupies a fine building in the Alameda, and alongside stands the great National Institute of Secondary Education. In 1882 the university was attended by
920 students and the institute by 1059. The city also contains a school of arts and trades (1849), a musical conservatorio (18-19), a national museum, a military school established in 1842 and enlarged on the abolition of the naval military school at Valparaiso in 1872 (now re-established), and a school of agriculture founded by the Agricultural Society chartered in 1869. The National Library is
a noble collection of books dating from 1813, especially rich in works relating to America ; there is also a good library in the National Institute. Besides the official journal, Santiago lias four daily papers, as well as various reviews and other serials. Besides the Alameda, a great tree-planted avenue decorated with statues (the Abbe Molina, Generals San Martin, Carrera, O'Higgins, and
Freire, &c.), the principal open spaces in Santiago are the Plaza de la Independencia, the Canadilla, a broad tree-bordered avenue, the Alameda de Yungay, the Campo de Marte (where are the Penitentiary, a prison built and administered according to the most approved modern principles, and the large Artillery Park), the Quinta Normal de Agricultura, which comprises zoological and
botanical gardens, and the large area in which the International Exhibition of 1875 was held. As the Mapocho was unfit for drinking, water was introduced about 1865 by an aqueduct 5 miles long. The prevailing winds at Santiago are from the south and south-west. On an average rain falls for 216 hours in the course of the year, mostly between May and September. Snow and hail are both extremely
rare. Earthquakes are so frequent that as many as twenty-seven or thirty shocks are sometimes registered in a year. Those which have proved really disastrous are the earthquakes of 17th March 1575, 13th May 1647, 8th July 1730, 19th November 1822, and 20th February 1835. The population of Santiago, which was returned in 1865 as 168,553 (79,920 males and 88,633 females), had increased to 200,000
in 1883.
It was in February 1541 that Pedro do Valdivia, one of Pizarro's captains, founded the city of Santiago del Nuevo Estremo in accordance with a vow he had made at Cuzco. The place has all along held an important position in Chilian history, but perhaps none of the events with which it is associated sent such a sensation through the world as the burning of the Jesuit church with the loss of more than two thousand lives in the flames (8th December 1863).
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