Start from 55 curated places around Santiago, CL, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Boragó
Chile's highest-profile restaurant, where the kitchen has spent years building a tasting menu around endemic and foraged Chilean ingredients — cochayuyo seaweed, piñones from araucaria pines, desert herbs — in an extended format that changes entirely with the seasons. The cooking is intellectual but not austere; the surprise is how often it makes you laugh.
Ambrosía Bistro
A bistro at Las Condes' MUT market building, where the menu changes with the market every week and the cooking is precisely the intersection of French technique and Chilean product that the city's food media has been writing about for years. The room fills with a mix of industry workers and regulars who follow the changing menu rather than a fixed one.
Trails & outdoors
Cerro San Cristóbal Loop
The main trail up through Parque Metropolitano from the Pío Nono base to the Virgin statue summit, covering the most accessible 880-meter peak in the city — 5.6 miles with 774 feet of gain and views that span from the Andes to the coastal range on clear days. The path passes the Japanese garden, the observatory, and multiple viewpoints, with the funicular as a backup if legs give out.
Parque Natural Aguas de Ramón
A foothills nature reserve at the eastern edge of Las Condes with four marked trails ranging from family walks to a serious day-hike to the Salto de Apoquindo waterfall. The Los Peumos trail — 4 miles, 1,151 feet of gain, 4.8 stars from 486 AllTrails reviews — is the balance between effort and reward that most visitors settle on.
Things to do
Teatro Municipal de Santiago
Santiago's 1857 opera house, where Luciano Pavarotti and Julio Bocca performed, still operating a full season of opera, ballet, and orchestral concerts in a Second Empire interior with genuine gilded boxes. The resident Philharmonic and Ballet Nacional are the main companies; the building is as much the reason to attend as whatever is on stage.
Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral (GAM) Performances
The cultural center's 10 performance halls host Santiago's most adventurous contemporary theater, dance, and music programming at prices designed for local audiences — significantly cheaper than equivalent work in European or North American cities. The free outdoor performances on the terrace in summer are among the most consistently good free entertainment in the city.
Landmarks & sights
Cerro Santa Lucía
A volcanic hilltop park rising from the edge of downtown, with castle-like stone terraces, Moorish fountains, and views across the rooftops to the Andes on clear days. The city was formally founded here in 1541, and the winding stone staircases reveal a different scene at every level — buskers, benches, and small plazas tucked into the rock face.
Parque Metropolitano de Santiago
The largest urban park in Latin America, covering the whole of Cerro San Cristóbal above Bellavista, with a funicular, cable car, outdoor pools, the national zoo, and the iconic 22-meter Virgin statue at the summit. Santiago spreads out below in all directions with the snow-capped Andes as the backdrop — the view after rain is the one locals wait for all year.