“The soul of Santiago’s greene

A couple of years ago, during a winter trip to the Magallanes region and Chilean Antarctica, I had the opportunity to visit Cerro Hat. It was Sunday, its inhabitants were protected in their homes and the tangent sun of the high southern latitudes penetrated in those hours before the twilight the broken glass of the sports center of Cerro Hat.

In front of his monumental stairs there was a greenhouse that seemed in abandonment. Clear and transparent building in the middle of the rugged Pampa Fueguina, protected a microclimate distant to the Fuegian environment, created to welcome hundreds of tree species, plants and vegetables that fulfilled the promise of growing, decorating and providing an area of ​​extreme climatic conditions.

Romy Hicht Marchant grew in this small oil camp near the border with Argentina in Tierra del Fuego. Between Puerto Percy and Cerro Hato, in that steptaparian vegetation barely interrupted by Coirones, sheep pins lived until the age of ten, when he moved to Punta Arenas. I think about that while I finish reading his most recent work, The soul of Santiago’s greeneryand at the same time, the image of the sole inhabitant of Cerro Hat that I divided that cold Sunday afternoon returns to my head.

The west wind blew with sharp insistence and, on a street away from the center, an older man swept the sidewalk that gave the front of his house. With each broom movement the dust rose and described a perfect semicircle, to fall on the ground again, following the indifferent will of the wind.

I interrupted his work to ask if he knew of a warehouse open for those hours, to which he responded with a quick and indifferent sign, to quickly return the rhythm of his sweep, useless in my eyes, perhaps necessary for him. As if the gesture of sweeping was enough to affirm something about his place in the world.

When reading The soul of Santiago’s greenery (Orjikh, 2025), that image returned strongly to my head. Not only because of the author’s origin, architect, doctor of history and architecture theory at Princeton University and current Dean of College UC, but above all, because this book deals, in the back They resist the greenery.

It is a book on trees and vegetated spaces, yes, but also about power, modernity, beauty and exclusion that these spaces suggest. And about how the greenery of a city can be as manufactured as its architecture.

The hypothesis that runs through this work is clear and powerful: the landscape is a cultural construction, a social and symbolic artifact that has been molded with a precise intention. The book focuses on the current emblematic vegetable spaces of the great Santiago, to make us see that its parks and alamedas were not wild or natural, but a domesticated nature for political, hygienic and aesthetic purposes. In this sense, the book strips the urban green of any innocence. He reveals it as an ideological, moral, strategic scenario, where his parks, alamedas and walks keep an agency as radical as that of the public figures that were behind their construction and permanence.

Those spaces are, for Romy Heht, the Alameda de las Delicias, the Tajamares del Mapocho, La Quinta Normal, El Cerro Santa Lucía, the Forest Park and the San Cristóbal hill, milestones that structure the main chapters of the book. Each of them is examined as a large piece of documentation within a narrative of civilization, progress and control. Since they were not just spaces for walking or recreation; They were moral laboratories. The green, in that context, should not only cool or beautify: it should educate.

We see it from very foundational moments as in the Natural History of the Kingdom of Chilewhere Alonso de Ovalle raises in the mid -seventeenth century that logic free of naivety: the landscape had to be atured of his wild condition, symbolically cleaned to become the scene of the Christian and Republican order. That idea, which today may sound distant, Hecht demonstrates that he survives in every plant decision taken since then and projected to the present. The introduction of exotic species – we alike, sicomoros, robinias, olmos – on the native trees – maitenes, arrayanes, peumos and others of the sclerophilic forest of the central area – did not respond only to practical criteria of shade or rapid growth, but to a willingness to mark a symbolic distance with the local, the indigenous already eyes of foreigners arrived in Chile, the sterile and incivilized.

But in the book there are also spaces where local vegetation, inevitably, takes its revenge. Many of the strategies to establish a greenery in the urban capital required an arboreal and native base capable of resisting prolonged drought conditions, river overflows, seismic activity, thermal oscillations, among many other changes and discontinuities.

Here Heht recovers an advanced project by Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna for the streets of Santiago did in the mid -nineteenth century: planting fast -growing foreign trees for, with this pioneer forest of poplars, straightenings and birch, ensuring the shadow, and then, under its coverage, introduce more slow endemic species, such as caneness, peumos and carabus.

A plant policy – known as vegetational succession – that can also be read as a cultural metaphor: the immediate appropriating the silent persistence of those who have managed to resist the multiple changes, and achieves, after all, to throw definitive and perpetual roots, although they are not visible to the naked eye.

In this book, in addition, figures known as Claudio Gay’s have been recovered in the role of landscaping and urban gardening, and others less visited, in a meticulous effort to rebuild the network of knowledge and trades that allowed these spaces to imagine. Hecht recovers fundamental but forgotten characters: gardeners, arborists, botanists and landscapers such as Luis Sada, Édouard Beaumont and Guillaume Renner, true authors of the architecture of the landscape of Santiago.

A job that the author already has been permeating in previous books such as The sublime nature of George Perkins Marsh y The landscape does matter (ARQDOCS DE ARQ, 2024) or the compilation, edition and translation of Landscapes for the town, essays by Frederick Law Olmsted (Orjikh, 2022). All of them saw in vegetation more than ornament: they saw a possible city story.

The writing of Heht, which balances scholarship with clarity, becomes even more interesting when we remember that, like every good narrative, it has been crossed by experience. The author grew in the Pampa Fueguina, where the non -domesticated wind and space draw other types of landscape. His work has revolved around the question of how we live what surrounds us, how we represent it, and how, with triumphs and losses, we achieved his domestication.

This new book is perhaps his most political work. Not in a partisan sense, but in the way in which it reveals that each tree planted in Santiago was an ideological decision. That the shadow under which we walk is the result of cultural disputes and nation projects.

Published by Orjikh Editores, the soul of Santiago’s greenery joins a catalog consistent with this critical and poetic look of the environment. Books like Future splendorby Andrea Casals and Pablo Chiuminatto – who reads Chilean poetry from an ecological sensitivity – or Be natureby Andrea Staid – which proposes an anthropological reconfiguration of the link with the environment – dialogue with this same urgency: to think of nature as a story, as a shared history, as a political material.

The footprint of Pablo Chiuminatto, co -founder of Orjikh and a key figure in Latin American ecocritics, is perceived in each line. This book is also a tribute to its legacy: writing nature from the south, with rigor, sensitivity and memory.

File The soul of Santiago’s greenery It is to open our eyes to a city that we thought we knew. It is to understand that our walks are full of fictions: that the parks are not only green, but ideological; that beauty is also a gesture of power. And yet, like the man who swept under the Fuegian wind, as those who plant trees without seeing them grow, there are in those acts a persistent dignity, a form of poetic resistance to what we cannot and can not control.

Data Sheet:

The soul of Santiago’s greenery

Romy Hecht Marchant

Orjikh Editores

April, 2025