This is my last post about my Patagonia trip! It was a great trip, but I this point, I feel like I’ve been writing about it forever, so I just wanted to do a quick wrap up about Santiago before I move on to some more BC related activities.

To be honest, before the trip, I didn’t really care about Santiago. It was a convenient place to leave from, but I would have preferred to have more time in Buenos Aires rather than Santiago. I ran out of steam planning the trip, so I didn’t plan anything for Santiago and left everything to Seth for our last 3 days.

But I ended up loving Santiago! I’m hesitant to say I liked it more than Buenos Aires, because I only saw a small portion of Buenos Aires, but I enjoyed Santiago so much more than I expected. This is partially due to the fact that we had no strict schedule, so we slept in and ate lots of good food and drank lots of wine and pisco sour. There is definitely some petty street crime in Santiago and we were advised to keep our phones physically attached to us by a cord because phone theft is super common. But overall, Santiago is a very vibrant city. It has a lot artwork all over the city and it was surprisingly gay (which is a compliment!). We saw a lot of pride all over the city and many openly gay couples, which I just didn’t expect to see in South America, so it was a really nice surprise.

As usual, we started with a walking tour of the city to get our bearings and we learned a lot of really useful history. Apparently Chileans have a pretty “jaded” attitude in general, and have a history of being agnostic about religion and bitter about politics. They were under a dictatorship for 20 years in the 70’s/80’s, and as a result, Chileans are frequent protestors. They have a strong sense of justice and will march in the streets for whatever they believe in, which we definitely witnessed.

Our tour guide gave us a detailed history of Santiago, which I won’t share for fear of mis-remembering some of the finer points. But what was striking was Santiago’s economic situation. Chile’s currency is super stable compared to Argentina, and for a long time Chile was doing really well, but Santiago has hit a rough patch since the pandemic. 3.5 million people have migrated to Chile during the pandemic, but there’s been limited economic growth. All the shops in the downtown had been shuttered and in their place, a lot of street vendors have popped up with desperate people looking to make money.

It’s not really related, but our guide also highlighted how Santiago is somewhat lacking in a culture of its own. Santiago was conquered by the Incas and the Spaniards; followed by an obsession with the French (which is really obvious in the architecture), so a lot of their culture is just borrowed from elsewhere, which contributes to the sense of bitterness and indifference from the locals. At least, this was my tour guide’s POV, it could be that he is just the one who’s jaded! Feel free to counter this argument!

Over our 3 days in Santiago, we visited a lot of attractions. We took the funicular up to the top of San Cristobal Hill and we visited both the National History Museum (wouldn’t recommend), and the Pre-Columbian Art Museum (would recommend). Museums are a bit tricky because a lot of them are only in Spanish, so plan accordingly.

Our favourite part of the city was St. Lucia Hill, which was conveniently located right next to our hotel. Our tour guide referred to it as the “gem of Santiago”, and we would definitely agree! It’s just a hill/park in the middle of the city, but it has all kinds of fascinated infrastructure scattered around it. The most obvious thing is to hike up to the top of the hill, where there is a tower lookout and a great view, but if you have the time, just let yourself get lost in the space, because there’s all kinds of different pathways and structures. It’s a fun place to explore and we ended up going there twice.

Another small attraction that I really liked was Alice’s Room, which is a small Wonderland themed cafe. It’s super popular, so we were lucky to get in without a reservation one morning. You really go to this place for the decor, the food is great too, but they’ve completely committed to the theme and it’s just fun to look at all the little details. Highly recommend if you have the time!

Otherwise, our last visit was to the Concho y Torro winery. It’s a very popular winery and even I have seen some of their wine in liquor stores in Canada, most notably, Casillero del Diablo. The tour was fantastic and quite different that other wine tours I’ve been on. The most memorable part is that the winery has a tasting vineyard where they have planted all 24 different varieties of grapes that they use to make wine. Now obviously, it’s not ideal to plant all 24 varieties of grapes in one place, but they don’t make wine with these grapes, they just allow guests to wonder the vineyard and taste any of the grapes that they want. I’ve never actually done this and was surprised that a lot of the grapes actually tasted pretty good. It was cool to wander around and try chardonnay and merlot and pinot grapes.

But the coolest wine fact I learned in Chile was about the carmenere grape. Carmenere is a grape that the world thought to be extinct for a long time, but was randomly found growing in Chile in 1994. So the wine was revived and you can now get it only in Chile. We sampled a few different Carmenere’s in Chile, and bought some from Concho y Torro to take home with us.

So overall, it was a great end to the trip! Seth planned most of our activities, which was a nice break for me and I enjoyed the relaxing aspect of this part of the trip. We were on the go early and often for our hiking adventures, so it was nice to have a proper rest in Santiago before returning home. Patagonia was definitely a memorable experience for me and I feel certain I will be back to explore more mountains and maybe one day (hopefully), we might make it to Antarctica.

That’s all for now, thanks for following along on our journey!