Santiago: Economic History & Challenges of a Nation｜Chile

This walking tour retraces Santiago through the story of money — and through the challenges that story left behind. In small groups and led entirely in English, you'll cover the historic center, but with a different question in mind at every stop: who paid for this, who didn't, and what did it cost the country later.
Start at GAM, built in 1972 to host a United Nations conference on trade and development — a brief moment when Chile placed itself at the center of the global economic stage, just before that model collapsed. Walk through Lastarria, once a quiet residential quarter, now one of the city's most valuable creative and commercial districts.
Continue into Parque Forestal and the Museum of Fine Arts, both built in the early 1900s with fiscal wealth from Chile's nitrate export boom — a windfall that modernized the capital almost overnight, and disappeared just as fast once synthetic nitrate was invented abroad. From there, reach the Santiago Stock Exchange, a Belle Époque dome that has anchored the country's financial markets since 1893.
The walk ends at La Moneda Palace — literally "The Mint." Long before it was a seat of government, it was the Royal Mint, where Chile's first coins were struck in the 18th century, and later the stage for the free-market reforms that still define, and divide, the country's economy today.
This is Santiago read through its economy, booms and busts included — for travelers who want to understand not just what built this country, but what it's still struggling with.