The Italian architect Joaquín Toesca had already shaped much of colonial Santiago, including its metropolitan cathedral, when he was hired to design a new royal mint. Work began in 1784, and the materials read like an inventory of Chile assembled in one place: limestone from the Polpaico estate, sand from the Maipo River, red stone quarried from Cerro San Cristóbal, white stone from neighboring Cerro Blanco, oak and cypress hauled from distant Valdivia, and ironwork shipped from the Basque province of Vizcaya. Santiago's kilns baked twenty kinds of brick for the lintels, floors, and walls more than a meter thick. Toesca died in 1799 without seeing it finished. The Mint House of Santiago de Chile finally opened in 1805, a serene expression of the neoclassical ideal at the far edge of the Spanish empire.

On that spring morning in 1973, the armed forces moved to overthrow the elected government of Salvador Allende. As tanks and infantry surrounded the palace, Allende refused to surrender, delivering a final address over the airwaves of Radio Magallanes. "I will not resign," he told the country. "I will pay with my life for the loyalty of the people." Then six Hawker Hunter jets of the Chilean Air Force came in low over the city and fired rockets into the building, setting La Moneda ablaze. Allende died inside as troops stormed the burning palace; investigators have concluded he took his own life rather than be captured. His body was carried out through Morandé 80, the side door Chilean presidents had long used to come and go like ordinary citizens, bypassing the ceremonial guard at the main gate.

The fire and the rockets gutted large portions of the palace, and the dictatorship spent years restoring it. The reconstruction was not only architectural. Beneath the front square, engineers carved out an underground complex, a bunker built to shelter Pinochet from any future attack. When the palace formally reopened on March 11, 1981, it did so on the day Pinochet assumed the presidency under his new constitution, and the regime briefly renamed it the Palace of Liberty, a phrase heavy with irony given what the building had just lived through. The restorers followed Toesca's original lines faithfully. Some of the bullet scars, though, were deliberately left unrepaired, small pockmarks in the stone that a careful eye can still find today.

La Moneda is no museum piece. It remains the working seat of the president of Chile and houses several cabinet ministries. Under President Ricardo Lagos the inner courtyards, with their orange trees and old cannons, were opened to the public during set hours, and Morandé 80 was reopened as a doorway and a memory. A changing of the guard still unfolds in the square on a schedule that runs through the calendar, the Carabineros de Chile marching their foot and horse battalions through a ceremony that traces back to the 1850s, complete with a band, parading riders, and a good deal of pomp. Below the plaza, the underground cultural center mounts exhibitions on Chilean art and history. The palace built to mint coins has become something far more valuable to Chile: a place where the country keeps watch over its own story, the proud chapters and the unbearable ones alike.