TRAVEL TUESDAY 545 - SANTIAGO DE CHILE

“Mining created Chile. The story of men who go down into the mountain and chip away at minerals in the darkness and then suffer an accident that leaves them at the mercy of that darkness is part of the DNA of Chile, an integral part of the country's history.” - Ariel Dorfman

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Santiago, also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile and one of the largest cities in the Americas. Located in the Chilean Central Valley within the Santiago Basin, between the Andes to the east and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west, it anchors the Santiago Metropolitan Region and its conurbation of Greater Santiago, which comprises more than forty communes and concentrates over a third of the national population and around 45% of Chile's GDP.

Most of the city lies between 500 and 650 meters above sea level, with recent urban growth extending into the Andean foothills. The basin that Santiago occupies has been inhabited since at least the 10th millennium BC, with early agricultural villages established along the Mapocho River and later incorporated into the Inca sphere of influence. During the Spanish invasion of the Americas, conquistador Pedro de Valdivia founded the colonial city of Santiago del Nuevo Extremo on 12 February 1541, laying out a grid plan around the Plaza Mayor (now Plaza de Armas). Despite early food shortages, Indigenous attacks, floods, and devastating earthquakes—notably in 1647—the city consolidated as the capital of the Captaincy General of Chile.

Santiago remained the political centre during the Chilean War of Independence, beginning with the First Government Junta in 1810 and culminating in patriot victory at the Battle of Maipú in 1818, and subsequently expanded through 19th-century railway construction, state-building projects, and the creation of major educational and cultural institutions. The city today is the political and administrative heart of Chile: it houses the presidential palace and the main organs of the executive and judiciary, while the National Congress meets primarily in nearby Valparaíso.

Economically, Santiago is the country's principal industrial, commercial, and financial hub and a regional centre for services, hosting the headquarters of major Chilean companies, regional offices of international organizations such as the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and several of the nation's leading universities and research institutes. Urban growth has been marked by the emergence of high-rise business districts such as Sanhattan, dominated by Gran Torre Santiago, the tallest building in South America and the second tallest building in Latin America (behind Mexico's T.Op Torre 1). 

Santiago's urban landscape combines a 19th-century neoclassical core and surviving colonial churches with extensive modern residential districts, standalone hills such as Cerro Santa Lucía and Cerro San Cristóbal, and parklands along the Mapocho River, including Parque Forestal, Parque Bicentenario, and Santiago Metropolitan Park.

The city has a cool semi-arid climate with Mediterranean characteristics, warm, dry summers and cool, wetter winters; its location in an enclosed valley contributes both to its scenic views of the high Andes and to chronic air pollution and winter smog. Santiago is served by Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport, a dense network of urban highways, and one of Latin America's most extensive metro systems.

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PABLO NERUDA

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” ― Pablo Neruda

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was born on July 12, 1904, in Parral, Chile and died on September 23, 1973, in Santiago. His real name was Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto and he was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He was perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century.

Neruda's body of poetry is rich and varied, but has developed along four main directions,. His love poetry, such as the youthful Twenty Love Poems and the mature Los versos del Capitán (1952; The Captain's Verses), is tender, melancholy, sensuous, and passionate. In “material” poetry, such as Residencia en la tierra, loneliness and depression immerse the author in a subterranean world of dark, demonic forces. His epic poetry is best represented by Canto general, which is an attempt in the style of Whitman at reinterpreting the past and present of Latin America and the struggle for freedom. And finally there is Neruda's poetry of common, everyday objects, animals, and plants, as in Odas elementales.

Pablo Neruda continued to write prodigiously almost until his death (the collection of his complete works, which is continually being republished, filled 459 pages in 1951; by 1968 it amounted to 3,237 pages, in two volumes), rising in the ranks of 20th century poets. He also received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda died just two years after receiving his Nobel Prize on September 23, 1973, in Santiago, Chile.

I Will Return

Some time, man or woman, traveller,
Afterwards, when I no longer live,
Look here, look for me here,
Between stone and ocean,
In the light storming
In the foam.
Look here, look for me here,
For here is where I’ll come, saying nothing,
With no voice, no mouth, pure,
Here I will return to be the movement
Of the water,
Of its wild heart,
Here I will be both lost and found:
Here I will be perhaps, both stone and silence.

                                                Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)