In both life and death it was a resting place for one of Latin America's most notorious dictators: a luxurious, 51-hectare country retreat where Chile's General Augusto Pinochet whiled away his weekends and where his ashes were taken.

But since Pinochet's death in December 2006, Chilean police claim the Los Boldos estate, about 120km from the capital, Santiago, has taken on a new role: as a marijuana plantation.

"I'm surprised," Lucía Pinochet Hiriart, the former dictator's eldest daughter, told Chile's La Tercera newspaper this week after the discovery of 182 marijuana plants was revealed. "We had no idea of what might have been going on at Los Boldos. It's open, even animals can get in. It's kind of abandoned."

Carlos Tapia Sánchez, the property's gardener, said: "I had no idea they had found a marijuana planation and what's more I have no idea whose it is."

The discovery at Pinochet's former summer getaway was made in March 2010. But ongoing legal proceedings investigating the origins of Pinochet's fortune reportedly meant that the find was not disclosed until this week.

As well as the plantation, police found two kilos of dried marijuana at the ranch, a favourite haunt for Pinochet, whose 17-year rule saw about 3,000 people executed and tens of thousands more tortured.

Pinochet reportedly purchased Los Boldos in 1994 and quickly set about turning it into a extravagant summer home, equipped with a swimming pool, a 2,000-tome library, a gymnasium and a cinema. La Tercera claimed that during his 503 days under house arrest in the UK, from 1998 to 2000, Pinochet confided to relatives that Los Boldos was the thing he most missed.

Los Boldos is no longer the bucolic paradise it once was. Rust has eaten away at its front gate and the windows of an abandoned guard-post at the entrance have been smashed. One unnamed worker told La Tercera that nobody had visited the ranch since the Chilean earthquake on 27 February last year.

A security guard warned the newspaper's reporters not to photograph the property, claiming it was a "military installation".

In an interview with La Tercera, the local chief prosecutor, Eduardo Fernández, said: "The investigation is still not definitively closed."