Qualla: La Chascona https://qualla.com/la-chascona en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:39:57 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/j/c/la-chascona-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: La Chascona https://qualla.com/la-chascona La Chascona: Introduction https://qualla.com/la-chascona/ Photo credit Pekka Parhi (Pecksique), CC BY-SA 2.5. Pablo Neruda named the house after his lover's hair. Chascona is a Chilean word borrowed from Quechua, meaning tangled or disheveled, and it was how the poet teased Matilde Urrutia about the unruly red curls piled on her head. When he began building a house for her in 1953 on the slope of Cerro San Cristóbal, in Santiago's bohemian Bellavista quarter, he was still married to someone else, and Matilde was a secret. So he built the secret a home, full of trick passages, narrow stairs, and rooms that climb the hillside like an afterthought, a house shaped less by an architect than by a poet's appetite for the playful and the hidden.

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Image: Pekka Parhi (Pecksique) | CC BY-SA 2.5

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/j/c/la-chascona-wp/66jc-la-chascona-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full La Chascona: A House for a Secret https://qualla.com/la-chascona/ Photo credit Arturo Rinaldi Villegas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Neruda kept three houses in Chile, and each was a self-portrait. La Chascona is the most intimate of them, a place designed to hide a relationship in plain sight. Its construction began in 1953 as a residence for Matilde Urrutia, the singer who would eventually become his third w...

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Image: Arturo Rinaldi Villegas | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/j/c/la-chascona-wp/66jc-la-chascona-a-house-for-a-secret.mp3 0:06 2 full La Chascona: The Portrait with Two Faces https://qualla.com/la-chascona/ Photo credit Paul Lowry, CC BY 2.0. On a wall inside hangs a 1955 portrait of Matilde painted by the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, one of the friends let in on the secret. Rivera gave her two faces in a single head. One looks outward, the public Matilde, the concert singer the world was allowed to see. The other t...

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Image: Paul Lowry | CC BY 2.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/j/c/la-chascona-wp/66jc-la-chascona-the-portrait-with-two-faces.mp3 0:06 3 full La Chascona: The House After the Coup https://qualla.com/la-chascona/ Photo credit Arturo Rinaldi Villegas, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1971 Neruda had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he was Chile's most celebrated voice, a poet who was also a diplomat and a committed leftist. Then came September 1973. Days after the coup that toppled his friend President Allende, Neruda died on September 23 at a Santia...

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Image: Arturo Rinaldi Villegas | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/j/c/la-chascona-wp/66jc-la-chascona-the-house-after-the-coup.mp3 0:06 4 full La Chascona: Restored by the Widow https://qualla.com/la-chascona/ Photo credit Marcelo Ois Lagarde, CC BY-SA 3.0. Matilde Urrutia refused to let the house die with its poet. She repaired the damage room by room and went on living in La Chascona until her own death in 1985, tending the home she had built with Neruda and keeping his memory present in a country where his name had become dangero...

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Image: Marcelo Ois Lagarde | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/j/c/la-chascona-wp/66jc-la-chascona-restored-by-the-widow.mp3 0:06 5 full