National Congress of Chile Palace in Santiago

About this audio guide

This guide to the National Congress Palace in Santiago follows the parliament building's tangled parentage: French architect Claude-François Brunet Debaines, who sketched it in Paris in 1848 and died seven years before construction began, and the string of architects, Lucien Hénault, Manuel Aldunate and Eusebio Chelli, who carried it to completion on the site of a church destroyed by a catastrophic 1863 fire. It traces the palace's own brush with fire in 1895 and the reconstruction that followed. Look for the statue of the Virgin among the garden trees, a memorial to that earlier disaster.