Esteban Trueba The big house on the corner
The family's early years
The rambling family home in the capital is the book's fixed point: Esteban Trueba builds it as a proud, orderly mansion, and over three generations his wife and daughters fill its rooms and its garden with unruly life. It has no real address; Allende models the setting on Santiago without ever putting the name Chile on the page.
Opening chapters
inspired by The house is invented and the country is never named, so this marks a representative point in the old upper-class heart of Santiago, the capital the novel plainly draws on.
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Esteban Trueba The Tres Marías estate
The family's early years
After the death of his first love, Esteban buries himself in the family's neglected country estate and turns it into a showpiece he runs like a small kingdom. Tres Marías becomes the stage for the book's long argument about land, class and power. The estate is invented; its fields and tenant farmers belong to the central-Chilean countryside.
Esteban rebuilds the hacienda (early chapters)
inspired by Tres Marías is a fictional hacienda in an unnamed country; this sites it representatively in the Aconcagua valley north of Santiago, the rural central-Chile landscape it is built from and where a recent screen adaptation filmed. Point at Llay-Llay.
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