Museo de Santiago - Casa Colorada

This guide to the Museo de Santiago - Casa Colorada opens at nine in the morning on September 18, 1810, when bells summoned nearly four hundred men to a hall near this deep-red mansion, and its owner, the elderly royal governor Mateo de Toro y Zambrano, walked over to open the meeting himself in the name of a king locked away in a French castle. It traces the ritual he performed that day and the household that had lived on this block since his father settled it in the 1580s. Officers of O'Higgins and San Martin later set up headquarters at the same doorway you're standing in.