La Moneda Palace

The Italian-born architect Joaquín Toesca designed the building as the royal mint of colonial Chile, and it opened in 1805. Coin production continued in the building until 1929. President Manuel Bulnes made it the seat of government in the 1840s. On September 11, 1973, during the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, Army forces attacked the palace with tanks and artillery, while the Air Force bombarded it from the air; President Salvador Allende died there. It was rebuilt over the following years and reopened in 1981. La Moneda is built in a restrained neoclassical style and is a protected national monument.

Since the start of José Antonio Kast's presidency in March 2026, La Moneda has also served as the president's official residence, which no president had used it for in decades.

History

Colonial mint

The colonial economy was in a deep depression around 1730, and in 1732 the Cabildo (municipal council) of Santiago asked the Spanish Crown to establish a mint in the city. Neither the local authorities nor the Crown had the resources to do so, so by royal decree of October 1, 1743, King Philip V granted the concession to a private individual, who would bear any losses and keep any profits. The concessionaire was the Spanish merchant Francisco García Huidobro, later 1st Marquess of Casa Real, who became the mint's perpetual treasurer. The mint was established on a site different from the present one, his house at Huérfanos and Morandé, and the first coin was struck in gold on September 10, 1749. In the 1770s the Crown took over the mint's administration, and it moved into a former Jesuit college that proved unsuitable. Plans for a purpose-built mint were drawn up but rejected by the Viceroy of Peru, who ordered new ones.

Joaquín Toesca, born in Rome in 1752, had been an assistant to Francisco Sabatini in Madrid before being sent to Chile to work on the Santiago Metropolitan Cathedral, where he arrived in early 1780. His work impressed Governor Agustín de Jáuregui, who asked him to design the mint. Toesca presented plans in 1782 for a site near the Mapocho River, but groundwater flooded the foundations, and the new governor halted the work in January 1784. Toesca then chose a new site, the former Jesuit property known as the solar de los teatinos, which is where the palace stands today.

Sources give the start of construction as 1784 or as 1786. Materials arrived from across Chile and beyond: limestone from the Polpaico estate; sand from the Maipo River; red stone from a quarry on Cerro San Cristóbal; white stone from the neighboring Cerro Blanco; oak and cypress from Valdivia; and Spanish metalwork from Vizcaya. Twenty varieties of brick were fired in Santiago for lintels, corners, floors, moldings, and solid walls more than a meter thick, a precaution in an earthquake-prone city.

Toesca died in 1799 before the mint was finished. The military engineer Agustín Cavallero succeeded him, followed by other pupils of the two men, including Juan José de Goycoolea, who completed the chapel and other finishing work. The "Mint House of Santiago de Chile" opened in 1805. It also housed the mint's superintendent, José Santiago Portales, whose family lived in an apartment on the second floor. Portales was removed during the Spanish reconquest because of his support for independence, and after the Battle of Chacabuco Bernardo O'Higgins reinstated him; he oversaw the first coinage of independent Chile. Coins were produced at La Moneda from 1814 to 1929.

Seat of government

From 1817, Chile's heads of state occupied the old and cramped Governors' Palace on the Plaza de Armas, which had housed Chile's rulers since the time of Pedro de Valdivia. In 1845, President Manuel Bulnes, citing that building's ruinous condition and the need for larger ministerial offices, decided to move the government and the presidential residence to the former mint. The transfer took place in stages in mid-1846. The Interior Ministry took the northwest corner and the president's residence the northeast corner, while coin production continued in part of the building. The cost of the conversion was widely criticized as extravagant.

In the 19th century, the palace was affected by earthquakes and by a fire in the presidential wing in 1855. The lime whitewash on the facades was replaced with plaster painted in oil in the late 1850s. President José Manuel Balmaceda (1886–1891) had the building extensively refurbished, adding a metal roof over the presidential courtyard and redecorating the reception rooms. The presidents who lived in the palace did so intermittently; Carlos Ibáñez del Campo was the last to do so, during his second term (1952–1958).

The palace did not originally have a southern facade, and the mint's workshops stood where the Patio de los Naranjos is now. The mint moved to a site adjacent to Quinta Normal Park in 1929, and in 1930 a southern annex facing the Alameda was built to a design by Josué Smith Solar, who followed Toesca's original design. An earlier proposal (1913) to remodel the palace in a more fashionable style had not been carried out. In 1940, a former mint pavilion from Toesca's design was demolished to make way for the Patio de los Naranjos. After the presidency of Gabriel González Videla, who furnished the palace with antiques and art brought from Europe, it ceased to serve as a presidential residence.

Historically the palace was open to pedestrians, but this was suspended for security reasons after the 1970 assassination of General René Schneider. It was reopened to the public in 2000 and closed again, and access from the Plaza de la Ciudadanía was restored in 2018 under President Sebastián Piñera.

1973 coup and reconstruction

During the military coup d'état on September 11, 1973, La Moneda, where Allende and some of his supporters were barricaded, was shelled by Army cannon and struck by rockets fired from two British-built Hawker Hunter jets of the Chilean Air Force. The palace was partly destroyed. Allende died by suicide in the palace the same day. The north facade and the pavilion between the Patio de los Cañones and the Patio de los Naranjos suffered the worst damage. Irreplaceable objects were lost, including the original Act of Independence of 1818, O'Higgins's original ceremonial insignia, and a portrait of O'Higgins by José Gil de Castro.

Reconstruction began in September 1973, at first under the direction of Santiago's municipal works department, and it was completed in 1981 under the Ministry of Public Works, with the aim of restoring Toesca's original conception. Offices were relocated, layouts changed, and some sections demolished. Several features disappeared in the process: the Morandé 80 entrance, traditionally used by presidents to enter the palace as ordinary citizens, was closed, and the room where Allende died was walled off. The seat of government moved to the Diego Portales Building while the work was under way. The foundations were reinforced with modern techniques, and the Plaza de la Constitución, long used as a parking lot, was redesigned with green areas and two fountains. An underground complex of offices and parking, popularly called "the bunker", was built beneath the plaza.

Return to democracy

After the return to democracy, the palace was repainted white under President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle. On September 11, 2008, President Michelle Bachelet inaugurated the Salvador Allende White Room on the second floor, recreating the office Allende used until the coup. The 2010 Chile earthquake caused minor damage, and the Salón Prat was the worst affected room.

Presidential residence

After the December 2025 election of José Antonio Kast, the president-elect announced that he would live in the palace, citing austerity and the logistics of commuting from his home outside Santiago. Kast took office on March 11, 2026, and became the first president to live in the palace since Ibáñez del Campo's term ended in 1958. According to the newspaper El País, his residence is in the wing of the palace where Allende died. The rooms he uses, on the second floor above the Interior Ministry, were previously used by the first lady's office.