In front of you stands the Casa Central, the main building of the University of Chile and the symbolic heart of the country's oldest public university. You start here because this building tells how the young republic set out to educate its citizens.

1A university for the republic

The University of Chile was installed in 1843, and its first rector was the Venezuelan scholar Andrés Bello, author of the Chilean Civil Code. For years it worked out of borrowed premises, until the state decided to give it a home of its own facing the old Alameda de las Delicias. The design was entrusted to the Frenchman Lucien Hénault, and construction, directed by the Chilean Fermín Vivaceta, ran from 1863 to 1872. It was the first tall building on the Alameda.

2A day of cannon fire

On 5 September 1938, a group of young Chilean Nazis seized the building in an attempted coup. On government orders, artillery was fired at the main door and four people died. It was the start of what became known as the Seguro Obrero massacre, one of the darkest episodes of those years.

The statue of Andrés Bello on the Alameda is a replica; Nicanor Plaza's original marble of 1881 stands in the courtyard that bears his name.

Today the building houses the rector's office, the Hall of Honour and the Andrés Bello Central Archive. It has been a Historic Monument since 1974.

3What to look for

  • The facade clock, installed in 1929 and made by the Munich firm of Clemens Riefler.
  • The coat of arms on the pediment, above the main door.
  • The statue of Andrés Bello, seated with a book, facing the avenue.

Documented

The building was constructed between 1863 and 1872, and in 1938 it was the scene of the occupation that ended in the Seguro Obrero massacre.

Sources and credits

University of Chile, history of the Casa Central; Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales, record of the Casa Central; Iván Jaksić, Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge University Press).

Photos:

  • Yellow neoclassical facade of the main building of the University of Chile on the Alameda: Rjcastillo, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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