Explore Chile

Santiago

Chile's sprawling capital spreads across a wide valley between the Andes and the coastal range, its modern financial towers rising above colonial neighbourhoods like Barrio Italia and Lastarria where some of South America's best restaurants and wine bars have taken root. The Cerro San Cristóbal hilltop offers a defining view of the city framed by snow-capped Andean peaks — and on clear days that view extends all the way to the ski resorts of Farellones, 45 minutes away.

Valparaíso

A UNESCO World Heritage port city built across 42 hills, Valparaíso is one of South America's most visually striking cities — its steep funicular lifts (ascensores), labyrinthine staircases, and paint-peeling Victorian mansions all covered in layers of extraordinary street art. The city that inspired Pablo Neruda's poetry and a whole generation of Chilean bohemian culture sits just 75 minutes from Santiago, making it an easy but essential day trip or overnight stay.

San Pedro de Atacama

The dusty desert oasis of San Pedro de Atacama is the launching pad for the most spectacular landscapes in South America: the Valley of the Moon, the geysers of El Tatio (the highest geyser field in the world at 4,500 m), the flamingo-dotted salt flats of the Atacama, and the Licancabur volcano looming at the Bolivian border. This small town of 3,500 people hosts more nationalities per capita than almost anywhere on the continent.

Easter Island (Hanga Roa)

The world's most remote inhabited island, 3,700 km off Chile's Pacific coast, is the site of one of history's great enigmas — 900 monolithic moai statues carved by the Rapa Nui people between the 13th and 16th centuries and distributed across the island's volcanic landscape. Ahu Tongariki, the largest restored ceremonial platform with 15 standing moai, is one of the most photographed archaeological sites on earth.

Puerto Natales

The small town of Puerto Natales, on the shores of Última Esperanza Fjord, serves as the base camp for Torres del Paine National Park — home to the famous W and O trekking circuits through some of the most dramatic mountain scenery on the planet. The Patagonian sunset turning the granite towers of Las Torres a deep orange-red is a view that travellers plan months of logistics around.

Puerto Varas

Sitting on the shore of Lago Llanquihue with Osorno volcano's perfect cone reflected in the water, Puerto Varas is the most picturesque town in Chile's Lake District — its German immigrant heritage visible in the wooden architecture, smoked meats, and kuchen bakeries that line the main street. The town is the gateway to the Cruce de Lagos crossing into Argentina and to the Los Lagos national parks.

Pucón

Chile's adventure capital sits at the base of Villarrica volcano — an active, lava-lake stratovolcano that the majority of fit visitors attempt to summit for the surreal experience of peering into its crater. Beyond the volcano, Pucón offers white-water rafting on the Trancura River, hot springs, and skiing at Centro de Ski Villarrica in winter, making it a year-round destination in the lake-and-volcano landscape of Araucanía.

Viña del Mar

Chile's 'Garden City' is South America's most famous beach resort, its fine Pacific beaches backed by ornate Belle Époque mansions, casino gardens, and manicured parks. Adjacent to Valparaíso and reachable by train from Santiago, Viña del Mar hosts the Festival Internacional de la Canción de Viña del Mar — one of Latin America's largest annual music events — every February.

Colchagua Valley

In the rolling hills 180 km south of Santiago, the Colchagua Valley produces some of South America's finest Carménère and Cabernet Sauvignon, with the colonial town of Santa Cruz as its hub — home to the Museo de Colchagua (one of Chile's best private museums) and a wine train that runs between vineyards on weekends. The valley's Casa Lapostolle, Montes, and Santa Cruz wineries have put Chilean premium wine firmly on the world map.

Chiloé Island / Castro

The largest island in Chilean Patagonia, Chiloé is a world unto itself — a misty, green archipelago of wooden churches (16 of which are UNESCO listed as a cultural landscape), stilt houses (palafitos) built over tidal channels, and a mythology so rich it has its own pantheon of sea serpents and witches. The island's curanto (a seafood, meat, and potato feast slow-cooked in a ground pit) is one of Chile's most distinctive culinary traditions.

La Serena

Chile's second-oldest city sits where the Elqui Valley — one of the clearest skies on earth and home to several international observatories — meets the Pacific coast, making it a dual destination for beach holidaymakers and astronomy enthusiasts in equal measure. The Elqui Valley's semi-arid slopes also produce the grapes for some of Chile's finest pisco, and distillery tours are a key attraction in the surrounding countryside.

Iquique

A city of Art Deco mansions and Victorian warehouses built on saltpeter-era wealth, Iquique sits between the Atacama Desert cliffs and the warm Pacific — making it both a historic destination and northern Chile's beach resort capital. Pichilemu has competition: the consistent waves of Playa Cavancha have helped make Iquique one of South America's top destinations for paragliding and kitesurfing.

Punta Arenas

Once the most important resupply port in the world for ships rounding Cape Horn before the Panama Canal, Punta Arenas now serves as the gateway to Chilean Patagonia, Antarctica cruises, and the penguin colony at Isla Magdalena where 120,000 Magellanic penguins nest. The city's Cementerio Municipal — a forest of ornate mausoleums belonging to the Croatian, English, and Spanish families who made fortunes in wool and shipping — is one of the world's great cemetery walks.

Arica

The northernmost city in Chile, sitting where the Atacama Desert meets the Pacific coast near the Peruvian border, Arica holds the distinction of being one of the driest places on earth — and home to the 7,000-year-old Chinchorro mummies, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the oldest artificially mummified human remains ever discovered. The city's historic core includes the Iglesia San Marcos designed by Gustave Eiffel, and the beaches to the south are a popular surf destination.

Coyhaique / Carretera Austral

The capital of Chile's Aysén region and the main town on the legendary Carretera Austral — a 1,240 km unpaved road through old-growth temperate rainforest, hanging glaciers, and fjords that is considered one of the world's great road trips and cycle touring routes. The surrounding Cerro Castillo National Park, accessible from Coyhaique, protects one of Patagonia's most dramatic mountain landscapes and is still largely undiscovered by mass tourism.

Antofagasta

The industrial heart of Chile's mining north, Antofagasta is the jumping-off point for the Hand of the Desert (La Mano del Desierto) — a giant concrete sculpture of a human hand emerging from the Atacama sands 75 km south of the city — and for the spectacular natural arch of La Portada marine reserve. The city's historic waterfront clock tower, a gift from the British community, reflects the Anglo influence that shaped the Chilean mining industry in the 19th century.

Viña del Mar / Casablanca Valley

Between the coast and Santiago, the Casablanca Valley has established itself as one of South America's premier cool-climate wine regions, with Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc thriving in the coastal fog that rolls in off the Pacific. Wineries like Casas del Bosque and Kingston Family Vineyards offer some of Chile's best wine-tourism experiences within 90 minutes of the capital.

Pichilemu

Chile's surf capital draws international surfers to Punta de Lobos — consistently ranked among the top ten left-hand point breaks in the world — and to the gentler beach breaks of Pichilemu town itself, which has been a destination since the early 20th century when Agustín Ross Edwards built a casino and park to develop it as a resort town. The annual Pichilemu International Surf Contest draws competitors from across the globe.

Torres del Paine

Though technically a national park rather than a town, Torres del Paine is Chile's most visited destination for international travellers — the iconic granite towers, turquoise lakes, hanging glaciers, guanaco herds, and condors making it one of the world's great trekking destinations. The five-day W Circuit and nine-day O Circuit through the park are among the most famous multi-day hikes on earth.

Puerto Montt

The industrial port city of Puerto Montt marks the end of Chile's central valley and the beginning of Patagonia, serving as the ferry departure point for the legendary three-day Navimag voyage through the channels and fjords to Puerto Natales. Its Angelmó market — a covered waterfront arcade of smoked fish, dried seaweed, and local crafts — is one of the best seafood markets in southern Chile.

Easter Island's Rapa Nui National Park protects the ceremonial village of Orongo, the volcanic quarry of Rano Raraku where nearly 400 moai statues still stand in various stages of carving, and the great ceremonial platform of Ahu Tongariki — together forming one of the world's most extraordinary testaments to a lost civilisation's ambition and skill. The island's entire population of moai, built between approximately 1250 and 1500 CE, were toppled during inter-tribal conflicts and only partially restored beginning in the 1990s.

Sixteen wooden churches scattered across Chiloé Island and its satellite islands represent a unique tradition of Jesuit and Franciscan mission architecture that blends European Baroque forms with local timber-building techniques developed by the Huilliche people. The churches — built without a single nail using pegged mortise-and-tenon joinery and distinctive polychrome painted facades — have been maintained by lay religious brotherhoods (cofradías) for over 400 years.

The historic port quarter of Valparaíso, inscribed in 2003, represents an outstanding example of the late 19th-century urban and architectural development in Latin America driven by the city's role as the most important Pacific port between Cape Horn and San Francisco before the opening of the Panama Canal. The city's distinctive hillside neighbourhoods, funicular lifts, and Victorian commercial architecture collectively constitute an urban landscape of exceptional historical authenticity.

Two ghost towns in the Atacama Desert that together represent the largest industrial complex from the 19th-century saltpeter boom — when Chilean nitrates were the world's primary source of agricultural fertiliser and explosives, funding the nation's development. At their peak, the oficinas salitreras supported a community of 3,500 workers who developed a unique pampino culture, now preserved in the rusting machinery, theatre, and workers' housing that remain frozen in time.

Clinging to a 2,000-metre Andean ridge above the El Teniente copper mine — the world's largest underground copper mine — the company town of Sewell was built by the Braden Copper Company after 1905 and became home to 15,000 workers living in coloured wooden tenement buildings stacked up the hillside without a single road. No cars were ever used in Sewell: staircases were the only form of internal circulation, and the town is now preserved as an outstanding example of a remote industrial company town.

The Qhapaq Ñan (Great Inca Road) is a 30,000-km network of roads built over 2,000 years by Andean cultures and later consolidated by the Inca Empire as the backbone of their administrative, trade, and military communications system from Colombia to Argentina. Chile is one of six co-signatories to this transnational World Heritage Site, which includes segments of the road running through the Atacama highlands of the Tarapacá region.

The coastal settlements around Arica in northern Chile preserve evidence of the Chinchorro people, who developed the world's oldest known tradition of artificial mummification — predating the Egyptian practice by roughly 2,000 years — beginning around 5,000 BCE. The Chinchorro mummies, some displayed in the Universidad de Tarapacá's archaeological museum, show extraordinarily sophisticated techniques of body treatment including the removal and replacement of organs, muscles, and skin.