The Santiago Metropolitan Park (), commonly abbreviated Parquemet, is an urban park in Santiago, the capital of Chile. Built around the summits of San Cristóbal, Chacarillas, Los Gemelos, La Pirámide, Polanco and El Carbón hills, together with the sectors of Tupahue, Lo Saldés, Pirámide and Bosque Santiago, the park straddles four communes — Huechuraba, Providencia, Recoleta and Vitacura — and is one of the largest urban parks in the world.Metropolitan Park. Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo. In Spanish. Its exact area has been recalculated several times; a 2025 zoning study set the park's official surface at , plus another of functionally linked land, for a planning total of about , though the figure of roughly 722–750 hectares remains widely cited.
Parquemet also maintains a separate network of 16 smaller urban parks spread across 13 Santiago communes, covering close to 150.1 hectares in total, which it looks after through conservation, maintenance and safety programs covering irrigation, replanting, pest and weed control, and general upkeep.Urban Parks. Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo. In Spanish.
The core of the present-day park traces back to a 1917 law authorizing the Chilean state to acquire the land between Bosque Santiago and San Cristóbal Hill for a future public park; the hill was landscaped for public use between 1922 and 1927.Parque Metropolitano. Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo. The unified park and its administering public service were formally created in April 1966, when the Chilean National Zoo and the services on San Cristóbal Hill were merged and placed under the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism.Parque Metropolitano de Santiago (n.d.). Parque Metropolitano de Santiago - Quiénes somos (PHP). www.parquemet.cl. In Spanish. Retrieved November 14, 2012 In September 2012 the Chilean government launched a "Bicentenary Plan" to refurbish and expand the park through 2016, including new footpaths, the planting of 100,000 additional trees, and expansion of the National Zoo,Gobierno lanza Plan Bicentenario e invertirá $22 mil millones en Parque Metropolitano. La Tercera. 29 September 2012. Retrieved 23 November 2012. and since 2018 the park has been the subject of an ongoing modernization effort known as the "Ecoparque Metropolitano" project. The park hosted mountain biking and BMX racing events during the 2023 Pan American Games.
History
Background Before its transformation into a public park, the slopes of San Cristóbal Hill were used for agriculture, firewood extraction and stone quarrying. During the colonial period and the 19th century, quarries on the hill supplied stone for numerous works around Santiago, including elements of the La Moneda Palace, street paving, and canalization works on the Mapocho River. Intensive logging and quarrying left much of the hillside eroded and largely stripped of tree cover; landslides near Purísima street in 1915 forced a municipal ordinance halting some of the quarrying.
Two notable installations already existed on the hill before the park's creation. The Mills Observatory — today the Manuel Foster Observatory, twin of the Lick Observatory of the University of California — was installed in 1903, becoming the first building erected on the summit.El Observatorio de San Cristóbal. Zig-Zag (magazine), editorial. Vol. 2, No. 65. Retrieved November 15, 2012. Construction of the observatory was authorized by President Germán Riesco, and although it was originally meant to operate for only three years, its scientific results extended observations for another quarter century. The Statue of the Virgin Mary on the summit was inaugurated on April 26, 1908.
Founding and early development (1915–1927) The idea of converting San Cristóbal Hill into a large public park was promoted from 1915 onward by journalist and legislator Alberto Mackenna Subercaseaux, together with Pedro Bannen Pradel and Ismael Valdés Vergara. Mackenna organized public campaigns, ceremonies, tree-plantings and excursions to win over both the public and the authorities. In 1916, before advancing the proposal, the government solicited favorable reports from the Higher Council of Hygiene on sanitary benefits, from the Fine Arts Commission on aesthetic merit, and from the Public Works Directorate on cost and feasibility; economist Guillermo Subercaseaux then drafted a bill presented to the Chamber of Deputies on August 28, 1916. In 1917, around 300 members of the Boy Scouts of Chile and troops of the Tacna Artillery Regiment carried out a symbolic occupation of the hill and planted trees as part of the campaign.
On September 28, 1917, Law No. 3295 was published in the Official Gazette, authorizing President Juan Luis Sanfuentes to accept donations, purchase, or expropriate land between Bosque Santiago and San Cristóbal Hill, inclusive; the land was declared for public use as the basis of the future park. A government-appointed appraisal commission delivered its report on June 1, 1918, and on June 17, 1918, Intendant Pablo Urzúa Vergara took formal possession of the hill's land on behalf of the state, in what proved to be his final public act before his death; he was succeeded as Intendant by Francisco Subercaseaux Aldunate, who continued driving the works.
By 1920 roughly 10 kilometers of roads had been built, along with surveying of the expropriated land, the establishment of plant nurseries, and the hiring of French-Argentine landscape architect Carlos Thays, who drafted a general plan of new roads, forested areas, viewpoints and other amenities. Early work focused on securing irrigation water for reforesting the arid slopes; by mid-1920 the first five kilometers of an irrigation canal toward the El Salto sector had been completed. Landscaping and public works continued under Intendant Alberto Mackenna Subercaseaux from 1921 to 1927. The first 400 aromo trees were planted in 1921, and by the following year around 30,000 trees had been established across the park. Architect Luciano Kulczewski designed several structures from this period, including the Casino Cumbre, the Casa de las Arañas, the Salón Tudor, and the Roof Garden.
The Funicular de Santiago, engineered by Ernesto Bozo Pezza with a Kulczewski-designed access station at Pío Nono, opened on April 25, 1925. That same year the National Zoological Garden was inaugurated on about 7.5 hectares of the hill's eastern slope. Quarrying continued on a smaller scale in subsequent decades before ending definitively in 1978. Between 1951 and 1978, a narrow-gauge tourist railway also operated intermittently from the base of the hill to its summit, though it was destroyed by flooding in 1952, rebuilt in 1960, and finally discontinued in 1978.
Consolidation (1960s–1999) Law 16,464, published on April 25, 1966, formally created the Santiago Metropolitan Park and the public service that administers it, merging the previously separate services of San Cristóbal Hill and the National Zoological Garden. The park was granted legal personality on August 26, 1966, and on November 24, 1966, its administration passed from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism, where it has remained since.
A second wave of major landscape and architectural works followed during the 1960s and 1970s. The Tupahue Pool opened in 1966, the Casa de la Cultura Anáhuac was inaugurated the same year, and the Plaza México and the Gabriela Mistral play plaza — the latter designed in 1968 by sculptor Federico Assler — followed shortly after. The Antilén Pool opened in 1971 under the name "Chacarillas" before being renamed Antilén in 1976. The Enoteca, a wine-tourism and exhibition center on Tupahue Hill, opened on April 16, 1972. The original Santiago Cable Car began operating on April 1, 1980, linking the Pedro de Valdivia Norte entrance with Tupahue and the summit through 94 four-passenger cabins. From the 1990s, park managers began shifting reforestation policy away from fast-growing introduced species and toward the reintroduction of native sclerophyll forest and Mediterranean-type shrubland species characteristic of central Chile.
21st century In 2000, the park's former northern-sector nursery was converted into the Bosque Santiago Environmental Education Center. The funicular was declared a national historic monument that same year, and in 2010 the Manuel Foster Observatory and its surrounding structures — the park's "second summit" — received the same designation.
The February 27, 2010 earthquake damaged several park structures, including the cable car, which had already been out of service since 2008. As part of the 2012–2016 Bicentenary Plan the government announced its intent to restore the cable car, though as of late 2012 it remained closed due to mechanical failures.Parque Metropolitano de Santiago. News (in Spanish). In December 2014, officials announced a US$9.5 million reconstruction, with work beginning in March 2015;PurasNoticias. News (in Spanish). the rebuilt cable car reopened on November 24, 2016, inaugurated by President Michelle Bachelet.
The Bicentenary Children's Park opened in 2012 on the northwest slope, featuring an amphitheater, treehouses, water features and an interactive fence,Casi 16 mil personas han visitado el Parque de la Infancia del cerro San Cristóbal a dos semanas de su apertura. Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo. 11 May 2012. Retrieved 23 November 2012. and it accompanied a broader reforestation program that revegetated some 145 degraded hectares with about 100,000 native plants. A design competition for a single consolidated telecommunications tower to replace the hill's cluster of radio and television antennas concluded in February 2014, with a design by Smiljan Radic, Gabriela Medrano and Ricardo Serpell declared the winner;Primer Lugar Concurso Torre Antena Santiago: Smiljan Radic + Gabriela Medrano + Ricardo Serpell 05 February 2014. Retrieved 08 February, 2015. the tower was never built.
In 2014, the park underwent its first formal territorial expansion since 1917, expropriating 15.1 hectares from the Silva and Riesco estates and the Archbishopric of Santiago to reinforce continuity in the northern sector and open new trails, bringing its publicly reported area to roughly 737 hectares. The Zapadores access, improving connections with communes to the north, opened two years later. Between 2019 and 2022, the funicular underwent a comprehensive restoration, later complemented by universal-accessibility works at its Pío Nono and Cumbre stations. On June 21, 2019, the Museo de la Vivienda Tradicional Local, developed with the University of Chile and featuring full-scale reproductions of traditional Chilean dwellings from across the country, opened in the Bosque Santiago sector.
In 2025, a new comprehensive zoning plan for the park was approved, aimed at organizing conservation, environmental rehabilitation, infrastructure and recreation areas, prioritizing the restoration of native sclerophyll forest, habitat and threatened-species protection, climate-change adaptation, and regulation of future development. The plan also recalculated the park's official surface area at 688.62 hectares, plus 11.6 hectares of functionally linked land not formally part of the park (Plaza Los Gaviones, the high-voltage antenna grounds, the Sanctuary, Punta Riesco and Camino Montaña), for planning purposes totaling 700.22 hectares.
The park was also a venue at the 2023 Pan American Games: its slopes hosted the men's and women's Olympic-format cross-country mountain biking events and BMX racing competitions, while the road cycling races finished at the summit near the Virgin Mary statue, some 758 meters above sea level.
The Ecoparque Metropolitano project, Chile Nativo, and Ladera Viva