national consolidation was conservative, oligarchic and Catholic, and coalesced in the 1830s after the liberal liberator–hero (Bernardo O’Higgins, Chilean-born of Irish descent, illegitimate son of a Peruvian viceroy) had been forced to abdicate in 1823. The social basis was the rich landowners and the import/export businessmen of the Central Valley, soon to be sustained by huge mining rents.* This regime was remarkable, for its time and place, for two main reasons. First, it created an institutionalized polity with regular parliamentary and presidential elections (‘managed’ from above, true, by the executive). Second, it succeeded, throughout the nineteenth century – not in the twentieth – in subordinating the military to civilian rule.†
Like all the Hispanic American capitals (except Buenos Aires and Montevideo), Santiago is not a port city. It was founded on the insignificant Mapocho River in 1541, for half a century sharing its central role of the ‘Nuevo Extremo’ with Concepción a good 400 kilometres to the south. In 1800 it had something like 18,000 inhabitants, swelling to 50,000 by the end of the independence wars. Chile was not a big receiver of immigrants, but the country urbanized rapidly. In 1865 the capital had a population of 115,000, in 1900 of 300,000, and it became a city of a million in 1941.40
Santiago was built according to the imperial rules around its Plaza de Armas from the 1540s on, but the public architecture bequeathed to the new nation was late-born, from the last half-century of the empire. The cathedral, the fifth church on its site, was from the mid-eighteenth century, the city hall from 1789. The court, which also housed the captain-general, was late eighteenth century. Most inherited public buildings were designed by an Italian architect, Joaquín Toesca, or his disciples. Toesca then built the more impressive La Moneda Palace some blocks southwest of the Plaza de Armas, which was not only a mint but also included bureaucratic offices, a bodega and a chapel.41 After first using the Royal Court Palace, Chilean presidents moved into La Moneda in the 1850s.
The conservative character of the state was expressed in the prominent mid-nineteenth-century Archbishop’s Palace in the Plaza de Armas and, above all, in the iconographic sequences of public homage. The first national monument, decided in 1837 and inaugurated in 1860, celebrated Diego Portales, the businessman who – as minister of the interior, external relations and war and the navy – was the strongman of the state-formative regime of the 1830s. The liberal Bernardo O’Higgins, later remembered as the padre de la patria (father of the fatherland), died in exile in Peru and was officially rehabilitated only in the late 1860s. In 1872 he got a prominent equestrian statue, sixteen years after a monument to the commander who deposed him.42
The institutionalist orientation of the Chilean state has an interesting correspondence to the early infrastructural priorities of capital-city planning, pushed primarily by liberals like O’Higgins and, in the 1870s, Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. The former laid out the first part of the new main street of Santiago, the Alameda, as an agora-promenade, with benches, fountains, cafés and provisions for civic information. It has been extended, widened and given a due official name which nobody uses: Avenida Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins. It runs straight east-west but functions more like Vienna’s Ringstrasse than the Champs-Élysées, through its public institutional buildings, including the state and the Catholic universities, the military headquarters and the Presidential Palace, with the government complex of the early-1930s Civic Quarter around it and the Citizenry Square in front of it.
Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna is the most famous of Santiago planners; he governed only for three years, but his immediate successors continued his work.* He was the first of the great Latin American city planners inspired by Baron Haussmann, followed by Alvear in Buenos Aires, Francisco Pereira Passos in Rio and others. In his concern with streets, promenades and public space, Vicuña Mackenna was an eloquent, focused, nineteenth-century republican modernist – before twentieth-century CIAM modernists wanted to turn city streets into automobile highways: ‘After his house, where he spends a third of his life, nothing interests man more than the street, where he passes two-thirds of his life’.43 In today’s Santiago, Vicuña Mackenna’s imprint is most visible in the Cerro Santa Lucía, a central rocky hill turned into a much-beloved public promenade space with a historical scenography of monuments. His plan also included a vast modern sewage system.
The conquistador and city founder, Pedro de Valdivia, is in the Plaza de Armas, but his statue was an early 1960s gift of Francoist Spain. Conservative Chileans seem to have had a somewhat less subservient stance to the motherland than their Colombian compadres. The indigenous issue is still a wound kept open by the militant Mapuche people of the south, but like the settlements of British secession, post-dictatorial Chile came to recognize the other side of the conquest in a monument to the indigenous peoples in 1992.
There is no space here to follow the establishment of all the other Hispanic American capitals, from the colonial beauty of central Quito to the post–World War II Yankeefied ugliness of Caracas. I shall return to some of them in the context of popular and global moments, and I shall enter into Havana in connection with the urban coming of Communism. Before leaving the capitals of the Hispanic secession, we should note an exception to the rule of national capitals rising from previous imperial centres: the legal centre of Upper Peru, as today’s Bolivia was then called, was Chuquisaca, the seat of the Royal Audiencia (Court) of Charcas, not far from the silver wealth of Potosí, once the largest city. Under the name of Sucre, after one of Bolívar’s most able commanders, it became the capital of Bolivia. It still has a special constitutional status and was used for the Constituent Assembly of 2007, but with mineral wealth shifting from silver to tin further north, and after a regionally fractured civil war, the Bolivian capital was in the 1890s relocated to La Paz, also an old American city, founded in 1548.
The capital foundations of Brazil are not only 120 to 150 years apart, they were at the opposite ends of their own epochs. Rio de Janeiro started out in 1808 as the temporary dynastic capital of a European king in exile, the Portuguese king fleeing from the Napoleonic armies in a convoy of the British Royal Navy. Under his son, Brazil was in 1822 proclaimed a monarchical nation-state, based on slave labour and presided over by a titled aristocracy. In other words, Rio was the capital of the most traditionalist of all the settler secessions, British and Iberian. In 1960, the government of Brazil moved to Brasília – at that time, and even today, the most modernist capital city ever built. On both cities there are extensive, separate literatures which need no repetition here. What we have to do is to try to capture their manifestation of national power and, without dabbling too far into the dense floresta of Brazilian history, the bridge between these two polarized national moments.
Rio was never much of a state vitrine. Unlike Salvador/Bahia in the northeast, Rio was not built as a colonial capital, but as a fortified regional outpost. With the shift of the gravitation of the Brazilian export economy, it was made the capital in 1763. In 1799, the city had 43,000 inhabitants, a fifth of them slaves. The arrival of the Portuguese royal court, about 8,000 people, was an enormous boost, and by the time of independence the city had a population around 70,000, half of them slaves or domestic servants.44 The king was taken aback by the appalling quarters of the governor-general, in a swampy, insect-infested area by the harbour. Some extensions were made and another floor added, but the shabbiness and the climate stayed. A partial solution was a hilltop summer mansion donated by a rich merchant. This set something of a Rio pattern of executive buildings. After the end of the monarchy the President was housed in two aristocratic palaces bought by the state, first the Itamaraty Palace (later Foreign Office) and the Catete Palace. The republican Constituent Assembly in 1891 assembled in Quinta da Boa Vista, the mansion once given to the king. Before the Chamber of Deputies got its semi-neoclassical building in the late 1920s, it was located in the Monroe Palace, initiated as the overloaded Beaux-Arts Brazilian pavilion at the Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904, then shipped back to Rio and reassembled under the name of the US president for the occasion of the Pan-American Conference before being recycled as a national Congress building.
Between the Congress of Vienna and Brazilian independence, Rio was the official capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and
