Santiago holds the continent's finest pre-Columbian collection, a memory museum that confronts the dictatorship head-on, and three houses built by a Nobel poet. Between them run painted walls, brutalist theatres and Sunday antique markets.
Some 3,000 pieces spanning 10,000 years across the Americas, in the 1805 Royal Customs House. The Chinchorro mummies — the world's oldest deliberate mummification, older than Egypt — anchor the underground Chile Antes de Chile hall. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
South America's oldest art museum, opened 1880, in Emilio Jéquier's 1910 Paris-inspired palace with a glass dome by Belgian ironworks. Roberto Matta, Alfredo Valenzuela Puelma and Chilean 19th-century landscape painting fill the wings. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:45.
Cristián Undurraga's 2001 concrete-and-glass building steps down Plaza Mulato Gil de Castro on four split levels. Contemporary Chilean art from the 1960s on: Gonzalo Díaz, Voluspa Jarpa, Bororo. Tue–Sun 10:30–18:30.
Art-deco houses south of Providencia converted into some 200 workshops, design studios and small galleries along Avenida Italia and Calle Condell. Aninat has shown Chilean contemporary art since 1982; most galleries close by 19:00.
Estudio América's copper-clad 2010 building documents 1973–1990: Allende's last radio broadcast, Villa Grimaldi testimonies, thousands of victim portraits in a three-storey wall. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, Quinta Normal metro.
Chile's opera house since 1857, rebuilt in French neoclassical style after the 1870 fire; Caruso, Pavarotti and Callas all sang here. Guided backstage tours run weekday mornings through the foyer, boxes and workshops.
Neruda built it in 1953 for Matilde Urrutia, hidden on Cerro San Cristóbal's slope, laid out like a ship with a dining room below waterline. Ransacked after the 1973 coup and kept partly as found. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
The 1972 UNCTAD III building raised in 275 days, seized as the junta's headquarters, gutted by fire in 2006 and reopened in 2010 as a theatre and dance complex with rusted-steel skin. Free foyer exhibitions and evening performances.
Chile's largest open-air mural museum: over 40 painted gables on social-housing blocks around Calle Departamental, begun 2010 by residents with muralists including Alejandro 'Mono' González of the Brigada Ramona Parra. Free, always open.
Santiago's oldest surviving neighbourhood, declared a Zona Típica in 2009, with 19th-century façades, the Museo de la Educación and a 1868 French barbershop still cutting hair inside a restaurant crammed with antiques.
The 1925 Beaux-Arts national library on Alameda holds the Sala Medina's colonial Americana and rotating manuscript shows; outside, Calle Rosal and the Plaza Mulato Gil stalls trade in old maps, vinyl and 1960s Chilean posters.
The folk-music peña tradition that carried Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara survives in Bellavista's small venues; Patio Bellavista's courtyards hold craft-silver and lapis lazuli workshops, Chile's national stone, mined only here and in Afghanistan.