Santiago: Bitter Coffee, Street Dogs, and the Grid

The presidential palace, La Moneda, sits in the centre of the city and is most famous internationally for the events of the eleventh of September 1973, when Chilean Air Force jets bombed it during the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and installed the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet. Allende died in the building that day, whether by suicide or by execution remaining a matter of contested evidence. Pinochet governed Chile for the next seventeen years under a regime that killed approximately three thousand political opponents, tortured tens of thousands more, and exiled a significant portion of the country’s intellectual and professional class, while also implementing the economic liberalisation programme designed by the Chicago School economists whose influence Pinochet actively sought, producing a version of free-market reform in conditions of political repression that economists have argued about ever since. The palace was rebuilt in the 1980s. The changing of the guard takes place every other day with an elaborate ceremony that reflects the Chilean military’s sense of institutional continuity with its pre-coup past, which is the kind of institutional continuity that requires a certain amount of selective memory to maintain.

On each street corner in Santiago’s central districts, a dog. Not a stray dog in the distressing sense but a resident, a neighbourhood animal that has claimed a specific territory and is recognized and fed by the people who live and work there. The dogs patrol their patches with a proprietary confidence that suggests they understand their status. They escort strangers who enter their territory and retreat when the territory ends, barking at motorbikes and suspicious gaps between buildings with the professionalism of unpaid neighbourhood wardens. I had been told about this before arriving. The description does not prepare you for the specific quality of a large dog materialising from a doorway to walk beside you for three blocks and then, at an invisible boundary, turning back.

The coffee is bitter in the specific way of coffee that has been extracted at high pressure from dark-roasted beans without much care for the extraction time, which is to say it is very strong and very flavourful and not quite what you expect if your reference point is the carefully calibrated specialty coffee that Australian cities have spent the past decade producing. You buy your ticket at a cashier in the centre of the room, take it to the bar where someone makes the coffee, and drink it standing up at a counter facing the street. This is not a ceremony or an affectation. It is simply how coffee works in Santiago, quickly and practically, between other things, as it should.

The statue of the Virgin Mary on the hill of San Cristóbal watches the city from the east, reached by a funicular railway with a twenty-minute queue that is entirely worth it for what the height reveals: the Santiago basin spreading south and west toward the coast, the Andes rising to the east in a wall that on clear days appears impossibly close and impossibly large, snow on the peaks visible from a city centre that sits at only 520 metres above sea level. The view is the kind that reminds you, productively, that cities are contingent things built in specific geographies rather than neutral containers for human activity. This city is in this valley because this valley was here, and the valley is between these mountains because the mountains are here, and none of it was inevitable, which is worth knowing.