The story reaches back to the very founding of Santiago. Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia is said to have carried a small wooden image of the Virgin, the Virgen del Socorro, when he arrived in 1541, and a hermitage to house it rose on this spot in the city's earliest years. The Franciscans took up the site, and work on the church and its convent followed. The image still rests on the high altar today, one of the oldest objects in Chile to remain where centuries of worshippers have sought it out, a thread of continuity running from the conquest to the present.

Chile sits on one of the most violent seismic zones on Earth, and the church's survival is no accident of luck alone. Its nave was widened with side aisles over time, turning the original cross-shaped plan into a sturdy rectangle of solid masonry. The towers proved the weak point. The first bell tower fell in the earthquake of 1647, damaging part of the choir while the body of the church held. A rebuilt tower was badly hurt in 1730 and torn down in 1751. Researchers studying the ground beneath the church have even suggested it rests on a pre-Hispanic stratum that helps it ride out the shaking.

Look up inside the nave and the ceiling tells its own story. The coffered wooden ceiling is Mudéjar in style, a tradition of geometric Islamic-influenced woodwork carried across the Atlantic from Spain, and its construction began as early as 1615, before the church was even consecrated. The bell tower that finally endured belongs to a much later age. Built in the mid-1800s in a Victorian manner by the Chilean architect Fermín Vivaceta, it carries a distinctive clock and gives the old colonial church its familiar silhouette above the Alameda.

The church no longer stands alone. In the early twentieth century, part of the old convent was sold and cleared to make way for the Barrio París-Londres, a charming pocket of curving European-style streets that remains one of central Santiago's most beloved corners. What survived of the convent now houses the Museo Colonial, where colonial art keeps company with the church's long memory. Together they form a small island of the deep past in a restless capital, a place where the city can still touch its own beginnings.