Best Things to Do in Santiago: Hilltop Parks, Museums and Markets

Santiago’s greatest appeal lies in the contrast between its intimate 19th-century neighbourhoods and the scale of the surrounding geography. Within a single day you can inspect 7,000-year-old Chinchorro mummies inside a colonial customs palace, eat steamed razor clams beneath a Victorian cast-iron roof, and ride a 1925 funicular railway 280 metres above the valley floor to watch sunset turn the Andean glaciers pink.

Climb Cerro San Cristóbal and Cerro Santa Lucía

Two volcanic hills punctuate the urban grid and offer complementary perspectives on the capital. Rising directly above the Alameda, Cerro Santa Lucía (known as Huelén to the indigenous Picunche) was landscaped in 1872 by Intendente Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna with neoclassical terraces, the monumental Neptune Fountain, and the crenellated Torre Mirador at 629 metres. Across the Mapocho River, Cerro San Cristóbal climbs to 880 metres inside the 722-hectare Parque Metropolitano, linking the Bellavista Funicular, the 1908 Sanctuary of the Immaculate Conception, and the Teleférico cable car down to Providencia.

Tour the Pre-Columbian Art Museum and Museum of Memory

One block southwest of Plaza de Armas, the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino occupies the 1805 Palacio de la Real Aduana and displays one of the Americas’ finest collections of Andean textiles, Mapuche woodcarvings (chemamüll), and Mesoamerican ceramics, including the underground Chile antes de Chile wing designed by architect Smiljan Radic. At the western end of the centre opposite Quinta Normal park, the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos provides an essential, sobering account of Chile’s 1973 to 1990 military dictatorship through newsreel footage, letters, and survivor testimony.

Walk From Plaza de Armas to Palacio de La Moneda

Follow the pedestrianised streets of the historic core from the twin-towered Metropolitan Cathedral on Plaza de Armas to Palacio de La Moneda, the 18th-century neoclassical royal mint designed by Italian architect Joaquín Toesca that has served as Chile’s presidential palace since 1846. Beneath its southern square, the Centro Cultural La Moneda hosts major international art and photography exhibitions.

Explore Pablo Neruda’s La Chascona and Barrio Bellavista

Tucked against the forested lower slopes of Cerro San Cristóbal in Barrio Bellavista, La Chascona is the whimsical ship-inspired hillside house that Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda began building in 1953 for Matilde Urrutia. Audio-guided tours wind through its nautical dining room, secret passageways, and terraced gardens.

Taste Market Seafood and Watch Sunset from Sky Costanera

Spend a late morning comparing the 1872 cast-iron Mercado Central with the sprawling produce warehouses of La Vega Central across the river, then take Metro Line 1 east to Tobalaba to ascend floors 61 and 62 of Sky Costanera, the 300-metre observation deck atop South America’s tallest skyscraper.