This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On October 13, 2016, the Baha'i Faith dedicated its continental House of Worship for South America in Penalolen, a district of Santiago, Chile. Architect Siamak Hariri designed the building, and it opened to the public the week after its dedication, giving South American Baha'is a temple of their own for the first time.
The Santiago temple did not stand alone in the religion's history; it closed out a decades long building programme. It was the last of the Baha'i Faith's eight continental temples to be completed, a programme that had begun with the Mother Temple of Africa, an earlier chapter in the same worldwide building effort already recorded on this atlas.
Completing that programme mattered beyond South America itself. Each continental temple had marked the religion establishing a permanent, purpose built presence on a new continent, so finishing the set in Santiago meant every inhabited continent the Baha'i Faith counted itself present on now had its own house of worship standing.
What the Santiago dedication changed for the Baha'i Faith's spread was completing a global architectural presence begun decades earlier. A religion that had built its first continental temple in Africa closed the same programme in Chile, giving it a house of worship on every continent it counted as its own.