Barrio París Londres

About this audio guide

This guide to Barrio Paris Londres in Santiago starts with a handful of architects who bought up old vegetable gardens behind the San Francisco Church in the 1920s and laid out two short cobbled streets, naming them Paris and London with almost comic confidence. It follows how the neighborhood's prettiest mansion took on a second, darker use after the 1973 coup, when the secret police seized the building at Londres number 38 and guards began calling it Yucatan. Prisoners called it something else entirely, because through the walls they could still hear the bells of the church whose orchard the whole barrio was built on.