Our rental house is in Buin, a suburb of Santiago. We are in a housing development of small cookie-cutter houses, but it is very secure and with a car, accessible to the city. We headed into the wonderful Central Market, where we found that fish is sold in pieces too large for two people.
Our solution was to eat lunch in the market. Jonathan chose the winning dish, baby eels in garlic butter. We have only seen them previously in Spain, where they were even more expensive than in Chile–but so delicious.
From lunch in the market, we visited the Chilean Museum of Precolumbian Art. They have an exhibit of the highlights of the museum that includes beautiful, impressive ancient pieces from all over the Americas. Many of these (most of these?) were donated by the museum’s founder, an architect and artifact collector, Sergio Larrain Garcia Moreno. The breadth of the collection makes me wonder whether any of the founding items could be fakes–there are so many fabulous items that you begin to doubt they could all exist (Olmec to Aztec, from West Mexico to Chile).
Leaving the museum, we photographed the building below because the reflection makes it look circular, while only the right half is curved. The left half is reflected in the glass-clad building across the street.
When we returned to Buin, I looked up the founder of the precolumbian museum, Sergio Larrain Garcia Moreno, and found that he was an architect who designed the first Modernist building in Santiago in 1929. That curved building in our photo is the Edificio Oberpaur, the structure that made Garcia Moreno’s career.
Llywindatravels 2022 