Londres 38

Londres 38 ( for Spanish speakers) - darkometer rating : 5 - A house in Santiago de Chile at Londres street No. 38, originally housing an office of the Socialist Party, but seized by the Pinochet junta and used in 1973/74 as one of the clandestine detention and torture centres by the infamous DINA secret police (= Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional). From 2005 the site was turned into a memorial. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: see under Chile and cf. Memorial Museum and Villa Grimaldi . What there is to see: The place is still a work in progress as it were; some parts of the building still await renovation/preservation and are out of bounds to visitors. Most rooms that already are part of the "memorial space" inside have so far mostly been left bare. You can see only remnants of installations, like pipes protruding out of the wall; and there are broken tiles, burn marks on the parquet wood floors, and other traces that are vaguely suggestive, but hardly any furniture or so. In a way, though, this contributes to an uneasy, eerie atmosphere. The black-and-white tiles in the hall beyond the entrance are of significance – as these were the only thing that the blindfolded victims could see when they arrived here. This helped identify the place later. At one time, the military institution still occupying the site after the restoration of democracy (in 1990) even changed the house number to 40 in a rather crude cover-up attempt – and you can still find it listed as "Londres 40" in some travel guide books! Some of the rooms upstairs served as torture chambers – as a floor plan chart explains, but there is nothing graphic to illustrate this.