Santiago and Valparaiso in 6 Days: Capital, Port and Wine Valley

Start here because everything on day 1 is within eight blocks of it and because the square tells you what the day is about: the cathedral on one side, the old customs house that now holds the pre-Columbian collection a block west, the central market four blocks north. The cathedral is free and open daily. Chess players, portrait photographers with wooden box cameras and preachers all work the square from mid-morning; it is busiest and best on a Saturday. Metro Plaza de Armas, lines 3 and 5, comes up in the corner.

The best museum in Chile and the first place the two-tier pricing bites, so read the counter carefully. The museum's own site lists foreign visitors at 8,000 pesos, Chileans and foreign residents at 1,000, international students at 4,000 and Chilean students at 500. Several ticket resellers and aggregators quote 10,000 for the general foreign ticket instead; carry 10,000 and expect to pay less. Children up to ten enter free. Open Tuesday to Sunday, closed Mondays, with current listings splitting between a 17:00 and an 18:00 close, so treat 17:00 as the safe last hour. The Chinchorro mummies, the oldest deliberately mummified human remains anywhere, are in the basement gallery and are the reason to come.

A cast iron hall shipped from Britain in 1872, full of congrio, machas, erizos and picoroco. Two honest warnings. First, the touting is relentless: waiters from the central restaurants will walk beside you with laminated menus for the length of the building, and reviews complain about it consistently. The fix is to ignore the middle of the hall entirely and eat at one of the small counters around the edges, where locals eat and the bill is roughly half. Second, the building keeps longer hours than the stalls do: Sunday to Thursday 07:30 to 17:00, Friday to 20:00, Saturday to 19:00, but individual kitchens shut earlier. Order caldillo de congrio or a plate of machas a la parmesana. If you want the cheaper, less touristed version, La Vega Chica and Mercado Tirso de Molina are ten minutes north across the river, where a full lunch runs a few thousand pesos, though reviews there also report street crime in the surrounding blocks, so go in daylight and keep your phone away.

The presidential palace that was bombed on 11 September 1973, and underneath its forecourt a cultural centre dug into the ground. Note this one for later in the week: the centre is open Monday to Sunday 10:00 to 19:00, which makes it one of the very few Santiago museums that a Monday does not close. General admission is 3,000 pesos, under-12s and over-60s free, and Tuesday entry is free for everyone with an advance reservation. Exhibition programming changes, so check what is on rather than assuming. Outside, the changing of the guard happens on alternate days at 10:00 in the Plaza de la Constitucion.

The rocky outcrop where Santiago was founded in 1541, terraced into a folly of staircases and fountains by a nineteenth-century mayor who is buried in a chapel on it. Free, open every day 09:00 to 19:45, and there is one procedure nobody warns you about: at the entrance you write your name in a register and show identification, a security measure the municipality has kept for years. Take the Alameda entrance for the Terraza Neptuno, climb to the Torre Mirador at the top, and come down the eastern side into Lastarria. Wear something with grip, the stone stairs are worn smooth.

Four blocks of bookshops, cafes and small galleries between the hill and the park, and the pleasantest place in central Santiago to lose an hour before dinner. On weekends an antiques and books market fills the Plaza Mulato Gil de Castro. Walk north through Parque Forestal along the Mapocho as the light goes; the neoclassical pile you pass is the fine arts museum, which is free and shut on Mondays and is booked here for day 6.

A wine bar with over 250 Chilean labels and sommeliers who will actually argue with you about them, rated 4.5 with more than 8,000 Tripadvisor reviews and ranked around 62nd of some 3,500 Santiago restaurants. The point is the flights: three-glass tasting sets arranged by valley or by grape, which is the fastest way to work out whether you want Casablanca whites or Maipo reds before the valley day later in the week. The room is small and fills from 20:00, so book or arrive early. Reckon on 30,000 pesos a head for a flight and two plates.

Stay in Lastarria, Bellas Artes or the quieter end of Barrio Italia rather than in the financial district: you can walk to almost everything on days 1 and 2 and you are two Metro stops from the bus terminal on day 3. Reckon on 70,000 to 140,000 pesos a night for a mid-range double. You come back to Santiago on day 5, so ask about leaving a bag rather than dragging everything to the coast, or simply book the same place for the return night.

Chile's museum of the 1973 to 1990 dictatorship, and the single most important building in the city to understand it. Free, open Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00 with last entry 17:30, later in January and February, closed Mondays and on 1 January, Good Friday, 1 May, 18 and 19 September and 25 December. Allow two hours. The material is heavy, including testimony from torture centres and the recovered voices of the disappeared, and the top-floor wall of photographs is where most people stop. Audio guides are available in English. Metro Quinta Normal, line 5, is at the door, and the park across the road is a good place to sit afterwards.

Line 5 east to Baquedano, change to line 1 or walk. A single Metro fare in 2026 is 735 pesos off-peak, 815 at mid-level and 895 at peak, peak being 07:00 to 08:59 and 18:00 to 19:59; the rise took effect on 22 February 2026. Buy a bip! card at any station and load it, because single-journey tickets are not sold on the network. One Sunday quirk worth knowing: the CicloRecreoVia closes long stretches of Andres Bello and Pocuro to cars from 09:00 to 14:00 every Sunday of the year, which is wonderful on a bike and slow in a taxi, so take the train.

Mapuche, Rapa Nui and Aymara ingredients cooked as a modern tasting menu, rated 4.5 and ranked around 84th of some 3,500 Santiago restaurants. It opens Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner but on Sunday only 13:00 to 16:00, which is why it is the lunch on this day and not the dinner. Start with the bread basket, a wooden board of breads from across the country served with pastes, which is the dish people remember. A full tasting with a drink lands around 30,000 to 40,000 pesos a head. Book.

Neruda's Santiago house, built on the slope of San Cristobal for Matilde Urrutia and named after her unruly hair, laid out like a ship in three separate blocks up the hillside. Open Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00, to 19:00 in January and February, closed Mondays. The Pablo Neruda Foundation charges 11,000 pesos general and 4,500 reduced, the reduced rate covering under-17s, students accredited in Chile and residents aged 60 and over; the audio guide in six languages is included and there is no advance booking, entry is first come first served. Watch out for one thing when you read about the price: the Foundation has been running a promotion putting every Tuesday at 4,500 pesos for everyone, extended through July and August 2026, and a lot of sources now quote that promotional figure as if it were the standard one. This visit is on a Sunday, so budget the full price.

The 880-metre hill in the middle of the city, with a fourteen-metre Virgin on top and the Andes behind the skyline on a clear evening. The funicular from Pio Nono has run since 1925 and the cable car crosses from Oasis station in Providencia; a combined cable car and funicular ticket starts around 3,780 pesos, a cable car return around 3,760, and the all-in Vive el Parque combo around 8,000. Two scheduling caveats, and they disagree with each other, so allow for both: current listings give operating hours as Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 19:45, while the operator separately says the funicular closes on the first Monday of each month for maintenance. Either way a Monday is the wrong day to plan on riding up, which is one more reason Monday is spent on the coast. A new cable car route opened on 24 March 2026, so check which stations are running before you buy. Walking up from Pio Nono takes about 45 minutes and is free.

Bellavista's long-running Chilean kitchen, named for the Laura Esquivel novel and decorated to match, rated 4.5 across roughly 11,000 Tripadvisor reviews. It opens Sunday from 13:00 until midnight, which very few kitchens in this neighbourhood do, and that is why it is here. Note that Tripadvisor gives its Santiago rank against two different restaurant totals depending on which page you land on, so treat the rank as indicative and the rating as the useful number. Order pastel de choclo or the congrio. Around 25,000 pesos a head with a glass of wine. Book at weekends.

Pack tonight for the coast. Valparaiso is a walking city built on stairs, so take one small bag and leave the rest in Santiago if your hotel will hold it. Coastal nights are colder and damper than Santiago's at every time of year, so a windproof layer is worth the space even in January.