Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art
Pre-Columbian art from across the Americas in Santiago's neoclassical Royal Customs House.
The museum was founded by the architect and collector Sergio Larrain Garcia-Moreno, who donated some 1,500 objects to the city of Santiago, and opened to the public in December 1981. Its holdings cover roughly ten thousand years of artistic production across the Americas, grouped by cultural area from Mesoamerica and the Intermediate Area to the Amazon, the Central Andes and the southern Andes. Displays are arranged as art rather than as ethnography, with sculpture, textiles, goldwork and ceramics shown in darkened galleries.
It occupies the Palacio de la Real Aduana, the former royal customs house completed in 1807 to designs by Juan Jose de Goycolea y Zanartu, which later served as the National Library and then the law courts. A subterranean extension by the Chilean architect Smiljan Radic opened in 2014 and houses the permanent exhibition Chile before Chile, devoted to the peoples of the national territory. The second floor reopened in 2023 after three years of closure, restoring access to the full collection route.
Highlights
- Chemamull funerary figures and other monumental Mapuche wooden sculpture
- Chile before Chile, a permanent gallery in the 2014 underground extension
- Andean textiles, including Chancay, Paracas and Tiwanaku weavings
- Neoclassical customs house of 1807, later the National Library
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