Santiago

Santiago, Chile

A view from a rooftop in Santiago looking towards the Andes mountains at sunset.

Santiago puts a working capital in a river basin between the Andes and the coastal mountains, with hills inside the grid.

The place

Santiago serves as Chile's capital, and no other city in the country is larger. It spreads through an inland basin: the Andes rise immediately to the east, and a coastal mountain chain closes the west. The Mapocho River crosses the bowl. The built-up core sits in a wider metropolitan region, and the urban area known as Greater Santiago bundles forty-plus communes. Taken together those communes house more than one Chilean in three and turn out close to 45 percent of the country's economic output. Heights sit in the mid-hundreds of metres. The figure recorded for Santiago is 575 metres, inside a band of about 500 to 650 metres for most of the streets, and newer districts have climbed onto the first slopes beneath the Andes. A pair of hills break the grid inside the city. From them the layout is easy to read: a compact historical centre on the old Spanish blocks, then communes running toward both ranges. Plaza de Armas, formerly the Plaza Mayor, is still the square at the middle of that original plan. About 7 million people live in Santiago. Repeated earthquakes have stripped away much of the earliest building stock, so colonial houses are scattered among later public offices and a skyline of newer towers. On a clear day the mountains shut the view; in cooler months air can settle in the basin and erase them. Ordinary days are ministerial, commercial and crowded — markets and long cross-town trips as much as any ceremonial front.

Its story

Santiago's valley was in use long before any Spanish street plan. By the 10th millennium BC, bands were moving between the coast and the interior, hunting guanaco when meltwater opened the mountain side. They were mobile, not yet village farmers. Settled agriculture along the Mapocho comes much later, around 800 AD: beans, maize and potatoes in the fields, camelids in the herds. The farming communities later appear under separate names. In Chile they are called Picunche; Inca usage says Promaucae. Inca control arrived in the late fifteenth century and ran on into the early sixteenth. A colony of mitimas was set down in the middle of what is now the city, with a fort at Huaca de Chena and a sanctuary on the summit of El Plomo. Armando de Ramón, the Chilean historian, treated the valley as a launch point for southern campaigns that failed, and as a junction of Inca roads. The Spanish foundation is a clean break from that map. The founder was Pedro de Valdivia, an Extremaduran in Francisco Pizarro's service, dispatched from Peru. He came to the Mapocho only after riding south from Cusco. In 1541 he founded Santiago del Nuevo Extremo and drew a grid around the Plaza Mayor, today's Plaza de Armas. Hunger, Indigenous attack, flood and earthquake — a particularly destructive shock in 1647 — struck the young town. It held. The Captaincy General of Chile took the town as its capital. Patria Vieja, the early independence era, follows that same capital.

What to see

Culture

Santiago's culture is that of a capital which lost most of its colonial buildings to earthquakes and kept its memory in institutions, plazas and festivals instead. Spanish is the language of daily life, while older names such as Mapocho stay on the river and the map. Catholic practice still organises parts of the civic year: the cathedral on Plaza de Armas draws people for worship and for large gatherings, and parish churches across the communes do the same on feast days. September's national holidays bring cueca, flags and long family barbecues, and the rural huaso figure shows up in the city even though daily life here is urban. Public argument is normal around Plaza de Armas and La Moneda, where marches form part of the capital's political life. Families still head for the hills at weekends when the air is clear. In Santiago's churches, keep your voice low, skip flash during a service, and step aside rather than blocking people who are there to pray.

What to wear

Santiago's ceremonial dress is the huaso costume of central Chile, worn for rodeos and for the September national holidays rather than for the office. The main textile is the chamanto, a heavy woollen poncho, often reversible, patterned with strong geometry. With it go a chupalla of straw, a short jacket, riding boots and spurs. Women dancing the cueca wear full dresses, usually floral, with a sash at the waist. None of this is ordinary street clothing. Around the ministries people wear jackets, collared shirts and dark trousers; in Bellavista and the parks the uniform is jeans, trainers and a light layer. The dry warm months favour short sleeves, and the cooler wet months bring coats. A visitor should dress for walking and for a change of temperature after dark: closed comfortable shoes for cobbles and hill paths, a layer to add when the basin cools, and sun cover even on mild days, because the city stands at 575 metres in strong highland light. At the cathedral and other churches, shoulders and knees covered is the respectful habit. Huaso dress is for festival and saddle, not for touring the grid.

What to eat

Plan it

Best time. Santiago is pleasant to walk in March and April, milder autumn after the dry heat, and again in October and November, spring before the hot summer. Mid-year is cooler and wetter, and haze can sit in the basin.

How long. 3–4

Getting there. Santiago's long-haul airport is Aeropuerto Internacional Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez, a Latin American hub with routes that include Oceania. The last leg is by road: airport bus or taxi into the centre. Check transfers before travelling at the municipal site, https://www.gobiernosantiago.cl/.

Budget. mid

Tips

Etiquette

Nearby

Sources