The Costanera Center Torre 2, better known as Gran Torre Santiago (Great Santiago Tower), and previously known as Torre Gran Costanera, is a 64-story tall skyscraper in Santiago, Chile, the tallest in Latin America.

It is the second-tallest building by highest architectural feature (behind Q1 in Australia) and by highest occupied floor (after Australia’s Eureka Tower) in the Southern Hemisphere. It was designed by Argentine architect César Pelli.

The tower is not only the tallest in South America, but it also it is one so towering it casts a shadow more than a mile long.

The Gran Torre Costanera Center where the tower is located, represents a giant that dwarfs the city’s other skyscrapers, and overwhelms the view of a city founded in 1541 by Spanish conquistadors which still remains proud of its colonial-era buildings.

The 300 meters (984 foot) tall Gran Torre is not as tall as New York’s iconic Empire State Building (381 meters – 1250 feet) and is less than half the size of the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa (828 meters – 2,717 feet).

But it is significantly taller than the other regional giant, the Trump Ocean Club in Panama City (293 meters – 961 feet).

As part of the Costanera Center complex, which includes the largest shopping mall in Latin America, there are as well two hotels and two additional office towers.

Even though it rises 64 floors above ground, there are 6 basement floors, which makes the building actually 70 stories high. The tower has nearly 700,000 square meters of building space available built on 47,000 square meters of land.

Planners estimated that there would be some 240,000 people going to and from the site each day.

The structural engineering is performed by the Chilean company René Lagos y Asociados Ing. Civiles Ltda, and Salfa Corp. was responsible for its construction.

The construction actually began in June 2006 and was expected to be completed in 2010, but was put on hold in January 2009 due to the global financial crisis of 2008–2009.

Construction on the project resumed on 17 December 2009 and it was expected to be inaugurated in 2013.

In November 2010 it officially became the tallest building in Chile, taking the first place from the building Titanium La Portada, where in February 2011 it has overtaken Caracas’s Twin Towers primate to become the tallest building in South America.

Structural work on the tower was completed in July 2011 and the maximum height of 300 m was achieved on 14 February 2012, becoming the tallest building in Latin America. In 2013, the tower was completed, as planned.

On 11 August 2015 an observation deck, called “Sky Costanera,” was opened to the public in floors 61 and 62, offering 360° views of the amazing city of Santiago.

The total cost of the building was supposed to be around $400 million, but as usual the overall cost was around $1 billion.

All in all, it is a masterpiece of the South American Architecture, and definitely deserves to be called Grand Torre, a symbol of an emerging confident modern Chile.

For several hours, the floodwaters rose until they swept away Miguel Rutigliano Bieleski’s home, his wife and his two children. Bieleski said he only survived by clinging on to the branch of a tree.

Bieleski, 35, is one of many Brazilians in the south of the country struggling to rebuild their lives after being battered by a tropical cyclone this week. Around 7,700 people are estimated to have lost their homes, according to government officials.

At least 41 people died from the storm, with 46 still missing, according to authorities from Rio Grande do Sul state, which has declared a public emergency. Weather forecasters predict more rains before the deluge dissipates by Sunday.

Bieleski lives in the town of Lajeado, which was badly hit by floodwaters from the engorged Taquari river.

He blamed emergency services for the deaths of his wife and children, saying they had urged him to stay in his home to await help that never arrived.

“They did nothing,” he said, adding he is now facing the consequences.

Rio Grande do Sul emergency services did not respond to a request for comment.

Paulo Ricardo Siqueira Santos, who is also from Lajeado, now sleeps in his car after his home was filled with mud and water.

Before escaping, the 65-year-old retiree managed to save his gardening tools, his only means of subsistence apart from donations of food and water.

He said he was worried thieves would ransack whatever belongings remained, and he now lives in his car.

Britain recorded its hottest day of the year so far on Saturday, the country’s national weather service said, with provisional data showing a high of 32.7 degrees Celsius (90.9 degrees Fahrenheit) at Heathrow airport.

This year’s previous high was 32.6 C, which was reached on Thursday.

The Met Office said Saturday was also the sixth day in a row the UK has recorded a temperature over 30 C – well above average for the time of year.

The Met Office said last week that Britain had experienced its eighth warmest summer since 1884.

June was the hottest on record in the country. A wet July and a mixed August followed.

In July 2022, Britain recorded its hottest ever day when temperatures topped the 40 C mark for the first time.

Rescue teams took people out of floodwaters in inflatable boats and in bulldozers on Saturday as they moved into villages hit hardest by a sweeping rainstorm that killed at least 10 people in central Greece this week.

Storm Daniel, which meteorologists said was the worst to hit the country since records began in 1930, pummelled Greece for three days from Tuesday, leaving a trail of ruin after a record summer heatwave that had touched off huge wildfires.

Homes were swept away by torrents, bridges collapsed, roads were destroyed, power lines fell and crops in the fertile Thessaly plain were wiped out.

Authorities, who have struggled to evacuate people from flooded areas, raised the death toll to 10 people on Friday afternoon. Four people have been reported missing, they said.

On Saturday, rescue teams were moving into villages near the city of Larissa and close to the River Pineios.

The fire brigade has so far evacuated 2,806 people across the country. In Thessaly region, many residents were airlifted from the rooftops of submerged homes on Friday and Saturday.

An 80-year old fisherman with a small blue fishing boat helped evacuate at least 15 people in a village in the area of Karditsa, one of the worst-hit areas, according to iefimerida website on Friday night.

“I’m an old boatman, I have experienced another four floods in the village. This was the worst,” he told media.

Authorities shut the national highway connecting Athens with the northern city of Thessaloniki on Saturday due to the floods.

The deluge in Greece followed a huge wildfire in the north and the country’s hottest summer on record. Scientists say the country is on the front line of climate change, with freak weather incidents increasingly common.

Extreme weather events have struck across the globe in recent weeks, with floods in Scandinavia, southeast Europe and Hong Kong. In contrast, India had its driest August since records began more than a century ago.

A powerful earthquake in Morocco has killed more than 1,000 people and injured hundreds more, the country’s deadliest in more than six decades, toppling houses in remote mountain villages where rescuers dug through rubble for survivors.

The quake struck in Morocco’s High Atlas mountains late on Friday night, damaging historic buildings in Marrakech, the nearest city to the epicentre, while the most badly affected areas were in the mountains nearby.

The Interior Ministry said 1,037 people had been killed and another 672 injured by the quake, gauged by the U.S. Geological Survey at a magnitude of 6.8 with an epicentre some 72 km (45 miles) southwest of Marrakech.

In the village of Amizmiz near the epicentre rescue workers picked through rubble with their bare hands.

About 20 men including firefighters and soldiers in fatigues stood atop the ruin of a house in Amizmiz as they tried to remove rubble, bits of carpet and furniture protruding from gaps between pancaked concrete floors.

The quake, which hit at around 11 p.m. (2200 GMT), affected a sweep of the High Atlas mountain range. Tremors were felt as far away as Huelva and Jaen in Andalusia in southern Spain, Spanish television RTVE reported.

Street camera footage in Marrakech showed the moment the earth began to shake, as men suddenly looked around and jumped up, and others ran for shelter into an alleyway and then fled as dust and debris tumbled around them.

In Marrakech, where 13 people were confirmed dead, residents spent the night in the open, afraid to go home.

In the heart of its old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, a mosque minaret had fallen in Jemaa al-Fna Square.

Injured people filtered into Marrakech from the surrounding areas seeking treatment.

State television footage from the Moulay Ibrahim area some 40 km (25 miles) south of Marrakech showed dozens of houses collapsed at the foothills of a mountain, and residents digging graves as groups of women stood in the street.

Montasir Itri, a resident of the village of Asni near the epicentre, said most houses there were damaged.

“Our neighbours are under the rubble and people are working hard to rescue them using available means in the village,” he said.

Further west, near Taroudant, teacher Hamid Afkar said he had fled his home and felt aftershocks.

“The earth shook for about 20 seconds. Doors opened and shut by themselves as I rushed downstairs from the second floor,” he said.

In Marrakech, residents described desperate scenes as people fled for safety.

“I still can’t sleep in the house because of the shock and also because the old town is made up of old houses,” said Jaouhari Mohamed, an old city resident.

Moroccan state television broadcast images of troops deploying to help with rescue efforts.

It was Morocco’s deadliest earthquake since 1960 when a quake was estimated to have killed at least 12,000 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. At a depth of 18.5 km, experts said this was an unusually large tremor for the area.