In our South American itinerary, Santiago was another short stop, just like Lima. We only spent half a day in Chile’s capital, because of our flight connection from Lima to Patagonia.
In this half-day we had time only for the most touristic parts of Santiago: San Cristóbal Hill, Plaza de Armas, the pedestrian street and La Moneda Palace.
Early in the morning we took an Uber (just like from the airport to the city) and headed to our first stop, San Cristóbal Hill. We could not go up by cable car, because we were there on a national holiday - and on national holidays the funicular is not operating.
However, we could go almost to the top of the hill by Uber too and after a few minutes of walking, we reached the viewpoint: Terraza Bellavista. As because we were there in the morning, the smog over the city was not yet significant, so we could see the city, the Costanera Center - Santiago’s iconic skyscraper and the surrounding hills.
After taking some photos, we walked down to Barrio Bellavista on a hidden track. This is a really nice area with graffitis, pubs and restaurants, but again they were still closed because of the holiday.
Anyways, we had to rush, so we headed to Plaza de Armas in the downtown. This was a rather small square, with nice palm trees and a fountain in the middle of the pedestrian street.
We walked to one end of the street, where we found the local fish market, and the building next door, where several restaurants offered seafood specialties for the tourists.
On the way back we accidentally bumped into a costume shop, where people can buy any type of costume that you can imagine.
Among a lot of vendors and street musicians, we walked towards the other end of the pedestrian street to La Moneda Palace, which is the seat of the President of the Republic of Chile.
All these places that I mentioned above, we visited between 7 am and noon. We really had only half a day in Santiago, so it was time to call the Uber, and pick up our bags and then head to the airport.
However, this was one of the cases, when finding internet was not that easy. And because we were already at the time, when we had to leave in order to not miss our Patagonia-adventure, we did not have time to walk around to search for WIFI, so we just asked a police officer on the corner of La Moneda to give us Hotspot until we call an Uber. She was very nice and without hesitation helped us. So thanks to her we managed to get to the airport on time. When we arrived at the airport, we already had butterflies in our stomach because we were super excited about the next highlight of our trip: Patagonia.
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Have a nice day,
Berni