Santa Lucía Hill

Before you is Santa Lucía Hill, which the indigenous peoples called Huelén. The name is usually translated as "pain" or "misfortune", although its exact origin is still debated. From here, Pedro de Valdivia surveyed the valley before founding the city.

1A cemetery for outcasts

For much of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church would not allow those who did not share its faith to be buried in its cemeteries. Protestants and other dissenters, many of them foreign merchants and sailors, ended up buried on the slopes of this hill, which was then a barren crag even used as a rubbish tip.

When Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, intendant of Santiago, turned the hill into a public promenade between 1872 and 1874, he had a plaque placed in memory of those dead, whom he described as exiles "from heaven and from earth". The exact wording varies between sources.

2The intendant's tomb

Vicuña Mackenna died in 1886 and was buried in the neo-Gothic hermitage he himself had built near the top of the hill. His wife and children rest there too. According to the museum that bears his name, one of the bells of the Compañía church, the one that burned in 1863, hangs in the hermitage belfry: a thread linking the first and last stops of this route.

Some claim the hill is full of presences at night. What is documented is that for decades, those who had nowhere else to rest lay beneath its gardens.

3What to look for

• The Neptune fountain and the terrace staircases, from 1903.
• The battlements of Castillo Hidalgo, higher up.
• The outline of the hermitage, among the trees at the top.