Plaza de Maipú is an underground

metro station A metro station or subway station is a station for a rapid transit system, which as a whole is usually called a "metro" or "subway". A station provides a means for passengers to purchase Train ticket, tickets, board trains, and Emergency eva ...

on Line 5 of the

Santiago Metro The Santiago Metro ( es, Metro de Santiago) is a rapid transit system serving the city of Santiago, the capital of Chile. It currently consists of seven lines (numbered 1-6 and 4A), 136 stations, and of revenue route. The system is managed by th ...

, in

Santiago Santiago (, ; ), also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile as well as one of the largest cities in the Americas. It is the center of Chile's most densely populated region, the Santiago Metropolitan Region, whose ...

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

. The station is located under the

Plaza de Armas The ''Plaza de Armas'' (literally Weapons Square, but better translated as Parade Square or parade ground) is the name for Latin American main squares. In the central region of Mexico this space is known as El Zócalo and in Central America as ...

of Maipú. It was formerly the deepest station in the Santiago Metro system at deep. However, this has since been surpassed by the Line 3 platforms at Puente Cal y Canto station. The station was opened on 3 February 2011 as the southwestern terminus of the extension of the line from

Pudahuel Pudahuel (, Mapudungun "place of pools/water" or "place where seagulls gather") is a commune of Chile located in Santiago Province, Santiago Metropolitan Region. Santiago's international airport Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez is located there. ...

to Plaza de Maipú. The platform level of the station is built in a mined tunnel with an oval cross section. At their eastern ends, two also tunneled

transepts A transept (with two semitransepts) is a transverse part of any building, which lies across the main body of the building. In cruciform churches, a transept is an area set crosswise to the nave in a cruciform ("cross-shaped") building withi ...

open into a large, deep

cut-and-cover A tunnel is an underground passageway, dug through surrounding soil, earth or rock, and enclosed except for the entrance and exit, commonly at each end. A pipeline is not a tunnel, though some recent tunnels have used immersed tube constr ...

box. The ticket hall is on the first level down of this volume. Multi-level escalators, elevators and stairways lead to the surface.

Shooting

Five months after its opening, the Plaza de Maipú station was the scene of one of the only two acts of violence with fatal victims in the history of the Santiago Metro (together with the simultaneous attacks on trains at the Tobalaba and Los Héroes stations, both of Line 1, in 1986). On July 17, 2011, Israel Huerta Céspedes pulled a gun from his coat and began shooting for no apparent reason to the passengers of a car that was arriving at the terminal station. The passengers activated the emergency brake and the perpetrator managed to walk out of the station and then climb to the Plaza de Armas de Maipú, walking one block and then committing suicide. Huerta did not have a criminal record. He was born in the rural town of Las Cabras and arrived in 1980 to live in Rinconada de Maipú with his parents and ten brothers. He had no stable job and in 1994 was dismissed from his job as a cleaning assistant in a police investigation station in Chile in La Reina for misconduct. Relatives and close friends described him as a peaceful and kind person, but who had entered a strong depression after the death of his mother, two months before the attack. The shooting left several wounded, three seriously and two (Fernando Oñate Muñoz and Mario Acevedo Meneses) who later died while being treated in hospitals. After the attack, Metro suspended the operations of Line 5 between stations Plaza de Maipú and Las Parcelas for the development of the investigation.

References

Santiago Metro stations Santiago Metro Line 5 {{SouthAm-metro-stub