A city imbued with civic pride - O'Higgins would be proud

SANTIAGO LETTER:Of South America's liberators, O'Higgins is perhaps the most attractive

FOR ANYONE with the surname O’Higgins, a visit to Santiago must set off a surge of pride in their clan.

Climb Santa Lucía, the hill on which the city was founded in 1541 and where tourists stroll up its charming landscaped flanks to take views from the summit, and you will see below the broad avenue that cuts right through the centre of the city – Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins.

Look south and you will see the city’s main park where kids play in the fountains to escape the heat, overlooked by the Andes which rear up suddenly at the city’s edge and whose tops, even in summer, are covered with snow. This park too is named after O’Higgins, the illegitimate son of an adventurer from Sligo who only ever met his father once and never set foot in Ireland.

All across Chile, which this year celebrates the bicentenary of its independence, there is reference to this illustrious O’Higgins ancestor, who is revered as the “Father of the Country”. One of Chile’s 15 regions, the VI, which is heralded as the cradle of Chilean culture and today is home to some of its best wineries, is Región del Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins.

In the bohemian port city of Valparaíso, the national congress building – a brutal monstrosity which looks as though it was built by the dictator Augusto Pinochet as an ironic insult to the idea of democracy – sits on Plaza O’Higgins.

All this is no mean achievement for a man who was considered an outsider by the country’s elite, and who died in exile. He was born in 1778 to another remarkable O’Higgins, his father Ambrose, who in a late-blooming career rose to become the Viceroy of Peru – the king’s representative in his richest colony.

By then he had fathered Bernardo after using and abandoning a young girl in southern Chile. Despite his father’s neglect, his son would remain loyal to his memory even as he sought to eject his father’s master from South America.

Bernardo’s career was all the more remarkable as he was a poor military tactician and a naive politician. But he had other qualities.

His passionate cry at the battle of El Roble, when his late charge turned the day in the favour of the patriots against a Spanish force, is immortalised on his statue in Santiago – “Lads! Live with honour or die with glory. He who is brave follow me!”

Of South America’s liberators, O’Higgins is perhaps the most attractive. He was untouched by the megalomania that drove Simón Bolívar, or the moroseness that afflicted San Martin, his great Argentine ally. His six-year rule as “Supreme Director” was authoritarian, but of an unusually mild strain on a continent where independence from Spain was typically followed by either anarchy or tyranny.

He died in Peru in 1842 and his remains were subsequently brought back to Chile. In 1979 Pinochet had them reinterred in an “Altar de la Patria” in front of the austere colonial-era Moneda Palace, once a mint, and which today serves as Chile’s presidential palace, one of the many fine public buildings on Avenida O’Higgins.

Since the return of democracy in 1990 Chile has tried to free itself of the legacy of Pinochet’s murderous rule, and in 2003 the country’s socialist president demolished the Altar de la Patria and created Citizenship Square in front of La Moneda.

O’Higgins, along with two unknown soldiers, is now buried under the new square in a discreet underground Crypt of the Liberator.

On a recent visit it was closed, and the policeman guarding it said it was the army alone who decided who could go in. The crowds instead were to be found at an exhibition on China in the bright and airy new cultural centre, also buried under Citizenship Square.

Here, Chileans were learning about the history of a country with an insatiable appetite for Chilean goods and with whom trade has reportedly ballooned 950 per cent in the last decade. This boom has helped turn Chile into South America’s richest society and the envy of neighbours.

Younger European tourists often find Santiago a bit tame compared to the energy of Brazil’s megalopolises or the chaotic, decadent charm of Buenos Aires. But Latin American visitors love it for its organised functionality, its safety and high levels of civic pride and responsibility – still a mix all too rare on the continent. A recent election calmly saw power pass to the right for the first time since Pinochet’s fall. Chile has become South America’s no-drama, can-do society.

For a man imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment and progress, it is fair to assume that O’Higgins would be proud.