Salvador Allende's house, sold to be converted into offices

BarcelonaIt was supposed to be a space for historical memory, a place to know and remember the figure of Salvador Allende, but it will end up being converted into an office building. The house where the Chilean ex-president lived between 1953 and 1971 had been on sale for a long time. The executive of the progressive ex-president Gabriel Boric tried to buy it so that the intimate space where Allende became president would be transformed into a museum about his figure and his political legacy. But an administrative procedure full of errors led to the purchase operation ending in failure.

When the Chilean government tried to acquire the property, two of the four owners of the house held public office. Isabel Allende Bussi, the ex-president's daughter, was a senator at the time, and Maya Fernández Allende, the socialist leader's granddaughter, was heading the Ministry of Defense. The Chilean Constitution prohibits deputies and ministers from signing contracts with the public treasury, a legal limitation that Boric's government did not realize until three days after announcing the purchase.

Then, the family backed out of the sale to the state, and the fiasco led Maya Fernández Allende to resign from her positions at the head of the Defense portfolio in January 2025. Three months later, the Constitutional Court dismissed Senator Isabel Allende Bussi, and this summer the courts closed the investigation into the accusations of tax fraud filed in a complaint by a militant lawyer from the party of José Antonio Kast, the far-right president successor to Gabriel Boric in office. Justice dismissed the accusations, finding no evidence, beyond the incompatibility between holding office and making the purchase, that it ever took place.

Finally, the family has sold the house – located at number 392 Guardia Vieja street, in the Providencia district of Santiago, Chile – this August to the company Linkapsis Geodesia & Ingeniería SpA, a Chilean company in the geospatial field that will use it for offices. The purchase was made for 1,000 million pesos (approximately 948,000 euros); this is 67 million more than the price the state was willing to pay.

The study and the library, almost intact

Five decades after Allende and his family left the property, its historical value remains important. Inside, the house is practically intact. The office where the president, deposed by the 1973 coup d'état, held political meetings and the library remain almost as the family left them when they moved in 1971 to a house near the sea, in search of fresh air due to a lung illness that Hortensia Tencha Bussi, Allende's partner, suffered from. For now, it is a mystery what will happen to the objects that are still preserved.