Santiago on Christmas Day is 30 degrees and almost empty. The sky is the flat hard blue of a city with the Andes on one side and a temperature inversion on the other, and the streets in the centre are pretty empty due to the heat and the festive holiday.
The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes is shut, which is not a surprise, but the building is the point — 1910, built for the centenary, a glass-roofed neoclassical pile with palms in front of it and nobody at all on the steps.
In the Plaza de Armas there is an artificial Christmas tree perhaps twelve metres high, hung with red and silver, standing directly in front of the Catedral Metropolitana. The two cathedral towers and the tree line up so exactly from one corner of the square that it looks arranged, and possibly it was.
Reflections
The interesting frames are the accidental ones. A mirrored office tower on the Alameda takes the whole façade of the older building opposite and folds it — the cornice runs across four panels of glass, then steps down, then repeats. A few people wander in front of the (open for business) Mercado Central. Casa Naranjas, a restaurant and art gallery, glows orange in the afternoon light.
The Plaza de Aviacion is running its architectural fountains, throwing maybe thirty jets high into the air. The 50 metre high steel sculpture by René Orellana and Beatriz Silva, inaugurated in 1980 to honor the Chilean Air Force, is designed to cast the shadow of an airplane with extended wings. Nearby, shady paths beneath the trees provide a welcome respite from the blazing sun.
That is Christmas in Santiago, Chile. Tomorrow the flight north to Calama, and the desert.