Housed in the splendid Casa Braun-Menéndez just off the Plaza, this is the best museum in the city for understanding the wool-and-shipping era. The ground floor is preserved largely as the Braun-Menéndez family left it — Parisian furniture, hand-painted ceilings, a winter garden with potted palms, a dining room set for an Edwardian banquet. Upstairs, the historical galleries cover the original Tehuelche and Selk'nam peoples, the founding of the colony, the gold rush of the 1880s, the immense sheep estancias and the eventual decline of the wool economy.
The contrast is striking: the visible wealth of a family that owned more than two million hectares of grazing land downstairs, the photographs of the indigenous people whose land was taken upstairs. Entrance is free for Chileans on Sundays; the museum closes for two hours over lunch like an old bank.