Santiago

Santiago lives at the foot of the Andes, a wall of peaks closing off the end of the avenues. The city sits in a long valley with the Pacific on one side and the Maipo vineyards on the other, each less than two hours away. In the centre, Santa Lucía Hill raises its stone stairways and fountains on the rock where the city was founded in 1541. Around the Plaza de Armas de Santiago the street never quietens: chess players, barrel organs, ice-cream sellers. The Santiago Central Market serves conger eel and clams under an iron frame shipped from England, and the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art keeps textiles and ceramics from across the continent. The Cerro San Cristóbal funicular climbs to the stone Virgin standing three hundred metres above the rooftops. In the evening Patio Bellavista fills with terraces and pisco sour, a few steps from one of Pablo Neruda's houses.