Some Chilean History & Preserving the Past

As I was on the flight up to the Atacama, which I'm actually on as I'm writing this, I realised I'd missed out some fairly significant pieces of the history of the place.

For a start some of the buildings still carry the scars of the coup led by General Pinochet......

When he came into power he launched everything at the palace, planes, army, the lot.  He didn't hold back.  This is one of the government buildings in the main square, it's still riddled with marks from the bullets and that's quite high up so you can see it was fairly indiscriminate.

Secondly, they came up with a great way of preserving a heritage site, keeping the street looking the same but turning it into very attractive retail space.  I don't know if these pictures convey it but they stripped out the inside of the building and then bolted the new construction to the walls and built a new modern structure inside the old one.  Maybe instead of knocking out the old buildings and putting in shiny shop fronts the UK could have done something similar.  I'm particularly thinking about my home town here, York.  How much different Coney street could have looked.