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| From the top of the Santiago City Park. The Andes Mountains are in the background. The tall building to my left is the Gran Torre, the tallest building in South America (over 900 feet) |
If Santiago was located in the United States it would be the second largest city. It's a few million people behind New York City, but well ahead of Los Angeles. It's metropolitan population is over 6.3 million people, making it the 4th largest city in South America (Sao Paulo, Bogota, and Rio de Janeiro are the three largest). I'm sure you get my point, it's big!
We arrived Tuesday around 10:00 PM. Our flight back to Florida is on Thursday around 7:30 PM. This doesn't give us much time for exploring, hence the name of this post. What we quickly discovered in our roaming about near the city center was exactly what we suspected, we're only going to see a small sample of what this huge city has to offer.
The city is located in a valley about an hour away from the coast. The setting is absolutely stunning because of the two mountain ranges. The Chilean Coastal Range Mountains in another setting would be quite a site to see, but here they are towered over by the snow covered Andes Mountains.
We're staying near the historic city center in the Lastarria neighborhood. Everything we did was concentrated in this, and the adjoining neighborhoods. As we left the hotel (The Singular) we headed down Merced towards the Plaza de Armas, Santiago's main square. It's the size of several city blocks and full of trees and benches. I'm sure the trees would provide much appreciated shade in the summer, but with the temperature in the low 40's we found a bench that gave us a little bit of sunlight and warmth. We sat for a while and watched as the city slowly came to life. We moved on to the Mercado Central (Central Market) which was already going strong with locals buying fresh fish, meats, and vegetables. Even though we had a huge breakfast at the hotel I couldn't resist a tasty cheese empanada at Zuninos Emporium.
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| Plaza de Armas |
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| Santiago Cathedral adjacent to the Plaza de Armas |
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| Inside the cathedral |
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| Fresh fish at the market |
We spent a good portion of the day in the huge city park that bordered on the very colorful Bellavista neighborhood. The park is over twice the size of New York City's Central Park. Like the country itself, it is somewhat long and narrow and has various elevations throughout it's close to 1500 acres. We enjoyed the funicular ride to the top, where there were great views of the city and the Andes Mountains. From the top, we took a cable car to another section of the park where we walked around a bit before heading back down the same way we came (funicular). The cost for the funicular and cable car was around $15 US for the both of us The views were priceless.
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| Small chapel at the top of the park |
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| Churros time! |
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| Cable car in the park |
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| Looking down the steep funicular track. |
I had previously mentioned that the Bellavista neighborhood was quite colorful. This is because many of the building have been painted with graffiti art, which made walking down the street seem like roaming through a modern art museum.
After a nice, inexpensive lunch at an outdoor restaurant/bar we enjoyed retracing our steps from earlier in the day. The Mercado Central was still going strong as we passed. Now the pedestrian streets and the Plaza de Armas were packed with locals and travelers all enjoying a crisp afternoon in an amazing city.
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| Lastaria neighborhood, right outside our hotel |
