Qualla: Londres 38

Londres 38: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ccox csc, CC BY-SA 3.0. The street is one of the prettiest in Santiago: cobblestones, low European façades, the cluster of lanes named for Paris and London that wealthy families laid out in the 1920s. The house at number 38 looks like the others. Three stories, built in 1925, the kind of address a visitor might walk past without a second glance. That ordinariness was the point. Behind that door, for roughly a year after the 1973 coup, Augusto Pinochet's secret police ran the first link in a chain of clandestine prisons, and the people taken inside were never meant to be seen again.

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Image: Ccox csc | CC BY-SA 3.0

Londres 38: The House on a Quiet Street

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jo Novells, CC BY-SA 3.0. Until 1970 the building was an ordinary residence. Then the Socialist Party took it over as one of its headquarters, a fitting use on a street that had drawn Santiago's political and cultural life. After the coup of September 11, 1973, the National Intelligence Directorate, the D...

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Image: Jo Novells | CC BY-SA 3.0

Londres 38: The People Inside

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ciberprofe, CC BY-SA 4.0. Roughly 1,100 people passed through these rooms. They were overwhelmingly young: of those killed, 38 were under 25, and a dozen were minors not yet 20. They were students, organizers, and members of the Revolutionary Left Movement, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party, th...

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Image: Ciberprofe | CC BY-SA 4.0

Londres 38: The House of Bells

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arabsalam, CC BY-SA 4.0. Blindfolded and unable to see the city, the prisoners learned the building through sound. They heard church bells nearby and could not tell which church it was, so they named the place themselves. Some called it the House of Bells. Others, with the bleak humor that survives in te...

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Image: Arabsalam | CC BY-SA 4.0

Londres 38: Recovering the Address

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Branislav Marelic Rokov, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the end of 1974 the DINA had built larger facilities at José Domingo Cañas and Villa Grimaldi, and Londres 38 was closed, its prisoners scattered. The building passed through other hands, the number quietly altered, the street resuming its pretty calm. But survivors and the fa...

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Image: Branislav Marelic Rokov | CC BY-SA 3.0