Chile's Unavoidable City
Written: Jan 20 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Pretty town square, if you can't see beyond it.
Cons: An almost American degree of civic delusion amid obvious signs of decline.
The Bottom Line: If you're interested in the anthropology of dictatorship, you may enjoy this city where Pinochet was most loved. Frightening on countless levels, right down to its bones, and yours.
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| Urbanist's Full Review: TALCA |
Talca. The name sounds like an acronym, and Epinions has hardly helped by rendering it in all caps. But Talca is a city, the proud capital of the Seventh Region of Chile. Perfectly located as an overnighting spot on drives north or south from Santiago. Unavoidable. I overnighted there in both directions.
Enter from the north, and you pass the University-of-Talca-by-the-Freeway (modern, shiny, inaccessible except by cars which almost nobody owns here). As the road proceeds through monotonous suburbs, the banners begin, proclaiming Talca's glory and civic pride. Just as the banners grow most intense, the road seems to fall apart. By the time you are in the central city, many of the streets are dirt.
When it comes to Talca's self-image, I must defer to the city's hilarious website, http://www.talca.cl. Text winds seductively on a blue background, illegible words dancing to exuberant Handel. But none of the buttons seem to take you very far. In other words, it corresponds pretty closely to the arrival from the north: exuberant banners on progressively worsening roads. In addition, of course, the Handel announces Talca as a cultured, European city, a place to stroll by the water, sharing the day with other happy couples.
There is a river, but my "hotel on the river" was fully walled off from it. From the footbridge I gazed down into fast brown water, with all kinds of litter sweeping along. Then I walked back into the dirt street, the only access to the cobblestone driveway in my lodgings.
(It was here, the next morning, that the innkeeper and I sat for a while in the pleasant, fragrant garden, as she explained to me that while the dictator Pinochet had made "mistakes," Chile was certainly a happier place under his rule than it now us under this messy democracy. Talca, as others confirmed, was one of the strongest centers of support for the dictator ...)
At night, I went out in search of food, and found no restaurants worth the name. At night, Talca is a 30ish woman dressed for the symphony, striding in high heels across a dirt street, sniffed by dogs. It is a city of gritted teeth, where if we just don't see anything wrong, then nothing's wrong.
Like almost every city in Latin America, Talca is centered on a square called the Plaza de Armas. These plazas are so universal that you can learn a lot about a city by comparing them. The landscaping of Talca's is lovely by day, but it's at night that I notice how completely this city has abandoned its historic meeting place. Most Plazas de Armas are still vibrant town squares, points of pride for the city, lined with the best the city has to offer. Talca's has a little activity at the southeast corner, around the cinema, and the hideous modernist municipal office tower at the northeast corner. But the whole west side of the square is suicidally depressing. A single tiny grocery store, a classic airless hole-in-the-wall such as you'll find every block in much of New York, occupies a prominent spot on the southwest corner, offering the only sign of "civilization" there at night. The west side is taken up by the vast desolation of the Grand Hotel, where I sat nearly alone for dinner, at the height of the Chilean dinner hour, and ate one of the worst meals I've had anywhere outside my own kitchen. The registration clerk chatted with the restaurant's staff for much of my meal, since neither had anything much to do.
Like many US cities, but few Chilean ones, Talca is eagerly eviscerating its center. It has a business district a few blocks east of the Plaza, but it really comes to life on the yawning four lane boulevard called 11 Oriente, a place designed solely for traffic. Everything that you might want to go to, it seems, is some distance away, odd in a city where few can afford cars.
But then, this city isn't built for the people. Though mostly populated by the poor, it's built for the rich, with little sign of a middle class. Everyone else takes orders from the rich, if they know what's good for them. Obviously, this generalization describes an undercurrent of Chilean society generally, but if you want to see this dynamic operating full blast, hang out in Talca for a while.
Don't expect to get out, of course. Talca knows that most of its visitors will enter the city from the north, so the clearly marked roadways with banners are there. I recommending exiting the same way even if you're going south, because the southern route back to the freeway involves numerous one-lane signless dirt roads, blind turns, and free range chickens. Exiting this way, after entering by the other, I felt a bit like I'd been drawn into the mouth of a constipated beast, and tossed about considerably before I came out, needing a shower, at the Other End.
If you want to see a happy and vibrant Chile, plan your trip so that your day doesn't end in Talca. This is harder than it sounds. Perhaps there's some sort of vortex here, a joint project of the patron saints of dictatorship and capitalism, who, if they don't exist, clearly need inventing.
Recommended:
No
Best Time to Travel Here: Never
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Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 72 members
About Me:
Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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