La Moneda Palace

This guide to La Moneda Palace in Santiago opens on the morning of September 11, 1973, as President Salvador Allende broadcasts from inside the building while fighter jets close in and he turns down an ultimatum to leave the country. It reaches back to the palace's own origins, raised as a royal mint by the Rome-trained architect Joaquín Toesca starting in 1784, a building he did not live to see finished. Allende himself had first come to the palace decades earlier, as a senator.