Santiago, Chile

We arrived in Santiago Chile on a 2h20m Aerolíneas Argentinas flight from Buenos Aires’s regional AEP airport. With the now familiar warnings about taxi scams in mind, I’d arranged for a transfer to Hotel Boutique Le Rêve with Christian, the driver I’d also booked for a daytrip to Valparaiso, Viña del Mar and a little wine tasting. Christian’s friendly father, Antonio, covered for Christian for our airport transfer. Antonio spoke no English, but we got along fine with my rusty Spanish.

I’d read great things about our hotel and was looking forward to staying there for a few days and exploring Santiago and a bit of Chile. In addition to the Chilean capital, I had Valparaiso, Rapa Nui/ Easter Island and the Colchagua Valley wine country in my sights.

Hotel Boutique Le Rêve met my high expectations. In a charming, vine-covered building with a large back courtyard, it has sofas in a common area that feel more like a living room in a very nice home, a free serve-yourself coffee/tea time each afternoon and an honor bar. Our room was stylish and quietly elegant with big windows overlooking the courtyard both in the bedroom and the spacious bathroom. Le Reve is located in the Providencia neighborhood of Santiago on a pretty street near lots of restaurants and in walking distance to the Cerro San Cristóbal cable car and the vast Metropolitan Park of Santiago.

We walked all of about three minutes to dinner our first night at La Bifería, a steak restaurant recommended by the super helpful desk clerk at our hotel. The clerk also handed us a 20%-off coupon before we left which made me wonder if he’d steered us to a tourist trap. Not at all! We had a fantastic meal kicked off by excellent pisco sours. (And, our waiter happily accepted our coupon, informing us it applied to the total bill, including drinks.) When driver Christian recommended La Bifería the next day, he was impressed we’d already discovered one of his favorite spots. [I’ll write up our Valparaiso day with Christian in my next post.]

I’ve tried a few “free” walking tours in different cities (Hakodate, Japan, and a fun food tour in Sofia, Bulgaria, come to mind), and I thought that might be a good way to get a quick overview of Santiago. These guides live off whatever “tips” visitors choose to pay. In Santiago, they recommended $15-20pp. I’d found a highly-rated guide via GuruWalk and signed up for Diego’s group tour some weeks before our trip. Unfortunately, Diego canceled and and I was back to the drawing board the night before my preferred day. I was able to sign up for an English-speaking tour anyway, so we found ourselves at Plaza de Armas at 10am on a Sunday. Our new guide, María-José arrived in an Uber just as we did. She asked us to wait on a park bench to see if more English speakers might arrive. (GuruWalk guides in Santiago wait in the plaza wearing green caps, so it’s possible that people will just show up rather than signing up in advance.) We said we thought we’d go check out the interior of the nearby Cathedral while she waited, but she said she preferred to take us there herself when the tour began and asked us to stay. So began the less-than-auspicious start to our walking tour.

I’m going to vent here about one of my pet peeves with guides. (So you may want to skip this paragraph.) I want to scream when guides make their customers stand somewhere while they speak at length, wasting tourists’ precious time that could be spent walking while they talk. Or at the very least standing somewhere interesting and keeping it short. (A guide in Petra, Jordan, was the absolute worst, having our small group stand by trash cans near the entrance of the famous canyon thoroughfare while he blathered on and on until we just walked off and left. The only guide we didn’t really enjoy in Uzbekistan did the same thing, walking us outside the walls of Khiva to a parking area where she talked at length while our impatience grew to roam the streets of that gorgeous city.) Nice as she was, María-José violated this should-be-a-rule, keeping us in Plaza de Armas for nearly 40 minutes, moving us and two late arrivals only slightly to various historical markers around the plaza then launching into a detailed dissertation on local history at each spot. She made it worse by promising (as if it was a good thing) to give us a detailed history, followed by a summary. Oh good grief, just give us the summary and let’s walk around this intriguing city! Scanning the plaza, I realized the guide for the larger, Spanish-language group was doing the same thing. Who tells these guides to do this?! It’s a walking tour! To make matters worse, we spent all of about a minute in the back of the Cathedral because a service was going on, something I’d have been happy to stay and watch and could have done prior to the tour if María-José hadn’t asked us not to. Thankfully, it got better as our small group tried to impress on María-José how we’d like to see things go. She did pick up the pace, and she definitely knew a lot about Chilean history. We saw some highlights we might have missed or missed the significance of and that made the tour worthwhile. I’d recently read Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits and I was touched to see not only the monument to President Salvador Allende, but also Morandé 80, the door through which the body of Salvador Allende was removed from the presidential palace after the coup of 1973.

Happily back on our own, we headed to Giratorio, a rotating restaurant, for a celebratory birthday lunch. It was fun to take in the city and the surrounding hills and mountains as they slowly passed by the windows. Lunch was tasty and the waiters very accommodating, cheerfully moving diners from inside tables to tables next to windows upon request as other diners left.

Cerro San Cristóbal (Saint Christopher Hill) and the teléferico (cable car) to the summit beckoned in the afternoon. The base of the cable car was a fifteen minute walk from our hotel in the huge city park, Parque Metropolitano de Santiago. We bought cheap timed tickets for the cable car in machines at the bottom. There were a fair number of people in the park, but the line for the cable car wasn’t bad and moved quickly so we were soon aboard. (I’d looked at buying tickets in advance online, but the site showed only expensive package tickets, not what we were looking for.) The views from the cable car are stunning with the snow-topped Andes in the distance. Santiago is home to the tallest building in South America, the Gran Torre, and its presence rising above the city adds to the dramatic scene. It’s possible to get on or off at a midway point near a parking area, but we rode to the summit, the highlight of Cerro San Cristóbal.

A large terrace near the cable car station gives way to a wide uphill path past food and souvenir vendors to a final terraced slope atop which sits a 22-meter tall statue of the Virgin Mary (Sanctuary of the Immaculate Conception). A small church sits to the right of the hill, but it’s the statue that draws people to its base to sit and admire the views.

Our time in Santiago was laid-back and enjoyable. We didn’t have a lot of must-sees, just a desire to experience the city. We used the cheap and efficient metro system for longer distances. (We loaded a metro card loaned to us by our hotel as needed. A nice lady working in the Pedro de Valdivia metro station helped us calculate how much our planned trips would cost. Prices vary by destination and time of day.)

Constantly warned by locals about potential theft, mostly of the pick-pocketing variety, we kept an eye on our belongings, but never felt uncomfortable in the nicer areas where we focused our time. We did avoid the Plaza de Armas area at night, again after several warnings about more serious crime there and in other areas of the city. These kind of warnings are not uncommon in South America and merit taking seriously.

Practical Info:

As in Buenos Aires, finding an ATM that didn’t charge exorbitant rates was a challenge. Unfortunately, we needed cash for a few things. The ATMs in the Pedro de Valdivia metro station raised the rip-off factor to new heights: Not only do they charge a high fee, they also charge a poor exchange rate and another separate conversion fee. The total on one withdrawal would be 25%! We found a better alternative at the Santa Isabel grocery store at Av. Providencia 2178. Also, be aware that bank ATMs close on Sundays and after business hours along with the banks themselves.

September 2025