Santa Lucía Hill

This guide to Santa Lucía Hill in Santiago follows intendente Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna's 1872 gamble to turn a squatter-filled quarry into a fortress of gardens, convict labor hauling stone, marble urns shipped from Europe, and a mortgaged family estate to keep the masons paid. It traces the two-year build alongside the older Castillo Hidalgo fort, folded into the new grounds rather than torn down. Listen for the noon cannon, still fired from the summit today, a habit nobody quite remembers starting.