Chile

🇨🇱 Chile

Punta Arenas

Punta Arenas is the southernmost city of over 100,000 people in the world (125,000 population) on the Strait of Magellan in Chilean Patagonia — a city built on the geographic extremity that was, before the 1914 Panama Canal, one of the most important maritime chokepoints on earth. The Strait of Magellan (discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, the first European to circumnavigate the globe, who named it the Strait of All Saints) was the only navigable route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for 394 years — before the Panama Canal opened, every ship from Europe to California and Asia passed through this strait, and Punta Arenas grew rich as the gateway city. The city's great cemetery (Cementerio Municipal, 1894) with its magnificent cypress trees, elaborate family mausoleums of Patagonian immigrant families (Croatian, British, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) and the famous sleeping bronze angel (touching the angel's toe is said to guarantee a return to Punta Arenas) is one of the most beautiful cemeteries in South America. From Punta Arenas, the gateway experiences include: Torres del Paine National Park (340 km north, the defining Patagonian hiking destination), Tierra del Fuego (the island across the Strait, shared with Argentina), the Otway Sound penguin colony (60 km north, October-March, 5,000+ Magellanic penguins), and the day trip to the Isla Magdalena penguin colony (accessible by ferry across the strait, 150,000+ Magellanic penguins, the largest in the southern cone of South America). The city has a remarkably intact architectural legacy from its golden age (1880s-1920s) — the Victorian mansions of the wool and livestock barons, the Sara Braun Palace and the Montes Braun family compound on the Plaza Muñoz Gamero.

🇨🇱 Chile

Santiago

Santiago de Chile is the most dynamic and cosmopolitan capital in South America — a modern city of 7 million people in a long valley between the Andes (visible from the city centre on clear days at 5,000+ metres, snow-capped year-round) and the coastal range, just 100km from Pacific beaches and 2 hours from world-class ski resorts. Chile's extraordinary geography — the world's driest desert (Atacama) to the north, Patagonia to the south, Easter Island 3,700km west — makes Santiago the launching point for some of the greatest adventures on earth. The city itself has a sophisticated wine culture (Carménère, Cabernet Sauvignon from the nearby Maipo and Casablanca valleys), a vibrant arts scene in the Bellavista neighbourhood, the finest fish market in South America, and Mercado Central's celebrated seafood.

🇨🇱 Chile

Valparaiso

Valparaíso (population 296,000 city, 1 million metropolitan area; the main port of Chile, 120 km northwest of Santiago on the Pacific coast; the capital of the Valparaíso Region) is one of the most visually extraordinary cities in South America — a UNESCO World Heritage Historic Quarter (2003) built on 42 dramatic hillside cerros (hills) that rise steeply from a flat coastal strip (the plan), connected to the lower city by 16 funicular elevators (ascensores — the iconic wooden cable-drawn funicular lifts of Valparaíso, of which 7-8 remain in operation; the most famous are the Ascensor Concepción (1883), the Ascensor Artillería (1893) and the Ascensor El Peral (1902)). The cerros of Valparaíso (the hillside neighbourhoods) are covered in brightly painted houses (the corrugated iron cladding painted in every colour of the visible spectrum — the houses were built from the corrugated iron sheets used as ship ballast from Britain in the 19th century, and the painting is a tradition of individual homeowner expression rather than any municipal programme), lane-wide streets (the most labyrinthine urban street grid in South America — the cerro streets follow the contour lines of the hillside), and the finest urban street art in South America (the murals of Valparaíso: commissioned since the 1990s from Chilean and international artists, the street murals now cover thousands of square metres of the cerro house walls, creating the most extensive outdoor art gallery in South America). Valparaíso was the most important port in the Pacific for the entire period from the 1820s (Chilean independence) to 1914 (the opening of the Panama Canal) — the "Jewel of the Pacific" through which all Pacific trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific passed via Cape Horn; the city's relative decline after 1914 accidentally preserved its 19th-century architecture and urban character intact.