Since there is no presidential palace in Chile, the leaders either stay in their residence for life or rent one while they are in government.
That of President Gabriel Boric was unknown.
He had no family home, because he just turned 36, he grew up in the extreme south of the country, in Punta Arenas, and he has no children.
She lived with her partner, the now first lady, Irina Karamanos, in an apartment in the tourist and central Bellas Artes neighborhood which, at least until before the 2019 riots, was one of the jewels of Santiago de Chile, the typical place where locals often take foreigners to visit.
Once he won the elections, Boric asked if he could live in La Moneda, as a president has not done since the fifties of the last century, in an early sign that he was seeking to break the mold in the symbolic.
But the decision was different: he rented a mansion in the Yungay neighborhood, near the center of Santiago, a mix between San Telmo in Buenos Aires and the multicultural Lavapiés in Madrid, a place with an immense history from where decades ago the upper class of the capital and today, although very charming, it faces various problems.
The couple moved a few days before he took office and Boric himself was seen moving boxes.
A woman walks outside the house where President Gabriel Boric will live. MARTIN BERNETTI (AFP)
“With Boric's decision a circle is completed.
For the patriots of the 19th century, it was a neighborhood where the Republic was born.
If in the historic center of the city there were the landowners and on the outskirts the peasant vassals –in a very feudal society–, in the Yungay neighborhood an intellectual middle class began to emerge that conceived the Republic, which was a great prestige of the country” explains Miguel Laborde, a specialist in the urban history of Santiago de Chile, the first to publicly advise in EL PAÍS that the Yungay neighborhood was a great place for the president.
"It is no coincidence that the directors of the National Library, the first national literature prize winners, the professors of the University of Chile, the political leaders and the author of the national anthem, Eusebio Lillo, have lived in this area," he explains.
The tradition is that Chilean presidents live in the communes of wealthy families.
“Yungay is a place to think, plan and criticize Chile”, adds Laborde.
On Friday night, when he arrived at his new home for the first time as Chilean president, the people of the neighborhood –simple families, especially, with children in tow– came to greet him.
For days, the main square of the neighborhood, Plaza Yungay, had a colorful banner with the following message: "Welcome, neighbor president."
It is a square that – again with the similarities – bears some resemblance to the one in Coyoacán in Mexico City, especially because of its trees and dense shade.
But unlike the Mexican one, the Yungay square does not have so much life.
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The mansion on Huérfanos street where Boric lives was built in 1929 by the architect Andrés Garafulic and has 17 spaces and nine bathrooms.
With 432 square meters built and 230 square meters of land, it is on a corner and has, on the side, a passage of simple houses.
Today the street is closed and only the inhabitants can cross the border, because it is guarded 24 hours by Carabineros.
A few meters away, the delighted owner of the Brieba vinyl store can be seen.
Since Boric came to the neighborhood to visit the house and bought a record from the Argentine band Sui generis, sales have increased and the store has become famous.
Aerial view of a 60-meter-high mural by Chilean artist STFI Leigthon on a building in Santiago's Yungay neighborhood. MARTIN BERNETTI (AFP)
"From the Yungay neighborhood, Latin America was thought of in a very open way," says urban planner Laborde.
He relates that in this area lived Bartolomé Miter and Faustino Sarmiento, who later became presidents of Argentina, and Juan Bautista Alberdi, one of the drafters of the Constitution of that country.
Sarmiento wrote in the Yungay neighborhood, in fact, his famous book
Of him Facundo.
Those who welcome Rubén Darío in Chile were from the neighborhood and the Nicaraguan poet arrived “thinking America”, according to Laborde.
“The
Yungaínos
integrated the indigenous.
In the neighborhood lived Ignacio Domeyko, Polish, who wrote
La araucanía and its inhabitants
, a foundational book of the Mapuche world.
It is interesting that in the 21st century, when there is a claim in the streets of Chile of the original peoples, the new president has chosen to live in this neighborhood, ”says the chronicler and researcher.
It was the cradle of a republican culture that made the country proud and, above all, "not corrupt, of public service."
"That world is in that neighborhood and in no other part of the city, as a historical heritage," adds Laborde.
And he exemplifies: when the president of Chile, Aníbal Pinto, left the Government in 1881, since he had no money, he rented Lillo a modest house in Yungay.
This area has a peculiarity that the rest of downtown Santiago, to which it belongs, does not have: it has the Quinta Normal, which was acquired at this time by the State and where they experimented with species of trees, plants, crops and livestock.
“It is a symbol that Chile was being experienced in Yungay.
Not only from a bookish point of view, but from making a country, along with a profound criticism of the society of the time from the so-called gatherings ",
A "dangerous" neighborhood
Early in the morning, an older man in a cap, Manuel García, 88, sunbathes on one of the benches.
He agrees that Boric and his partner come to the neighborhood, although when describing the area, he comments on a complaint that is repeated when talking to the residents of this community: crime and drug trafficking.
A few meters away is the hairdresser where 41-year-old Venezuelan barber Rafel Pérez works.
“Since we know about the new president's house, the neighborhood right now is quiet.
Before it was dangerous, with altercations in the square.”
People pass in front of a mural in the Yungay neighborhood. MARTIN BERNETTI (AFP)
Meanwhile, several tents remain erected next to the monument to the Chilean broken (to the popular and urban man), a sculpture by Virginio Arias in honor of the popular Chilean character.
People complain that the square is taken over by some groups and that children cannot go to the children's games due to insecurity.
“You see delinquency, assaults on the street, arguments, shootings.
Children cannot occupy the square.
It's ugly taking the children to see all that, ”says Delia Palominos, a 38-year-old Peruvian, who walks down Libertad Street with her little son by the hand.
"I don't take him out to play.
From school to home”, assures the woman that she dedicates herself to housework.
Laborde bets that with Boric's decision "there will be an enhancement of the neighborhood", which since the end of the seventies has been rediscovered and inhabited by artists, writers, singer-songwriters and poets, such as Mauricio Redolés.
The traditional French Barber Shop – which was founded in 1868 by the Lavaut family, which continues to carry out fundamental work in maintaining heritage – is located in front of the NAVE cultural center.
In the surroundings, there are new cafes that have bet on the neighborhood in recent years in an incipient process of gentrification that is not obvious: mattresses and other types of large-format rubbish are common on the corners.
A little further, but within the neighborhood, are the Matucana 100 cultural center and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights,
For the architect Gonzalo Schmeisser, an academic from the Diego Portales University, “the fact that there are popular and ancient places in Yungay and, at the same time, there is the mansion where the President of the Republic will live, demonstrates the mestizo origin of Chilean culture. , with the imprint of the popular character, the thinker and, at the same time, the immigrant”.
Declared heritage in 2009 thanks to the drive and work of the neighbors themselves, organized and led by leaders such as Rosario Carvajal, Yungay has been defended by its inhabitants from the demolitions that have affected a good part of the communes that had architectural value, such as Ñuñoa or Providencia, in the same Santiago de Chile.
Today, therefore, it is protected and cannot be demolished.
A man walks through the Yungay neighborhood. MARTIN BERNETTI (AFP)
Nayareth Toro, 36, from one of the traditional families of the neighborhood, owner of a former shoe repair shop in one of the corners of the square, was born in Yungay and defends her beauty, almost always hidden from the eyes of those who do not know. take the time to understand it.
She nostalgically remembers the traditional children's games that were held in the square every January 20, when the day of the Chilean broken [humble person] is commemorated there.
There were "complete families, with clowns, stages, artists," she comments on a celebration that, according to her, has lost its spirit.
She says it in her business behind a fence, half because of the pandemic, half for security reasons, because even her potted plants have been stolen.
But she is hopeful.
“Since it was reported that the president would arrive in the neighborhood, it has been cleaned more and children are even seen in playgrounds,” he comments on Yungay, where there are still neighbors who greet each other in the streets and people who, before going to work , pass through the San Saturnino parish –patron saint of earthquakes– to cross themselves before the religious image that is on the street and ask that everything goes well
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