Chile Discovery Guide

Few countries let you stand in a desert that has not seen rain in living memory and, a few hours' flight later, watch ice calve off a glacier. Chile's length is not a statistic — it is the reason to come.

The Atacama has the clearest skies on the planet, which is why so many of the world's largest telescopes are built here and why the stargazing is genuinely extraordinary rather than merely good. The Patagonian south has Torres del Paine. In between there are volcanoes you can climb, wine valleys where the vines grow on their own roots, and a wooden-church archipelago in Chiloé.

The friction is distance and money. Santiago to Punta Arenas is a three-and-a-half hour flight, and doing it by land means ferries or a detour through Argentina. Chile is also the most expensive country in South America, and the far south in January is the most expensive part of it.

Book the Patagonian legs early — campsites and refugios in Torres del Paine must be reserved before you arrive, and they sell out months ahead.

If you travel slowly

Pick a third of the country. Three weeks in the south — the Lake District, Chiloé and the Carretera Austral — is a trip; three weeks trying to cover desert, capital and the far south is a series of airports.

If you want to see the essentials

Two weeks: Santiago and Valparaíso, San Pedro de Atacama, and Torres del Paine, with internal flights between them. That is the standard route for a reason, and it works.

If you seek local character

The Elqui Valley for pisco and observatories, Chiloé for curanto and the wooden churches, and a rural rodeo in the Central Valley in the season, which runs September to April. A fonda during Fiestas Patrias in September is the single most Chilean thing on offer.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

The Carretera Austral, 1,200 kilometres of mostly gravel through Aysén, with ferry crossings built into the route. The far north's altiplano around Putre and Lauca, at 4,500 metres, which almost nobody visits. And Rapa Nui, which needs its own week and its own planning.

Chile is 4,300 kilometres long and rarely more than 200 wide, and that shape produces a culture unusually conscious of distance and isolation.

Mapuche presence in the south

The Mapuche resisted both Inca and Spanish conquest and were never fully subdued. Mapudungun is spoken in Araucanía, land claims are an active political dispute, and this is current affairs rather than heritage.

A country that reads poets

Two Nobel laureates in poetry, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, from a small population. Neruda’s three houses are museums and are visited by Chileans as much as by foreigners.

Living with the dictatorship’s memory

The 1973 coup and the seventeen years that followed are within living memory, and the Museum of Memory in Santiago exists because the reckoning is deliberate and recent.

Wine and the central valley

Chilean viticulture escaped phylloxera entirely, so vines here grow on their own roots — a rarity worldwide — and Carménère, lost in France, survives as the signature grape.

• Easter Island
• Santiago Metropolitan

Fire is the issue in the far south. Torres del Paine has burned twice this century because of visitors — in 2005 and again in 2011 — losing tens of thousands of hectares of forest that will take centuries to return. Cooking is permitted only at designated sites with a camp stove. No open fires, anywhere, ever, and that includes cigarettes on the trail.

Book before you go. Reservations for every campsite and refugio on the W and O circuits are compulsory and checked at the park entrance. This is a capacity control, not a formality, and turning up without one means being turned away.

On Rapa Nui, never touch or climb a moai, and stay off the ahu platforms they stand on — they are burial sites. Much of the national park may only be entered with a local guide, visitors are limited to a 30-day stay, and you need a return ticket and booked accommodation to board the flight.

In the Araucanía, the Mapuche are the largest indigenous people in Chile and their land claims are an active, sometimes tense political issue. Community-run tourism exists and is the right way in; treat Mapuche communities as communities rather than attractions.

Water in the north is scarce and contested between towns, agriculture, copper mining and lithium extraction from the salt flats. Use it as though it were.

December to February is Chilean summer and the only reliable window for the Patagonian south — which is also when it is busiest and dearest, and when the wind is at its worst. Expect gusts on the Torres del Paine circuits that make walking genuinely hard.

March and April are the best-value months in the south: the wind drops, the southern beech turns, and the crowds thin. It is also the wine harvest in the Central Valley.

June to September is ski season in the Andes above Santiago, and the wettest stretch in the Lake District. Much of the far south shuts.

The Atacama works all year, with cold nights at altitude in any season. One counterintuitive exception: the invierno altiplánico — the altiplano winter — brings thunderstorms and rain to the far northern highlands in January and February, which can close the road to the geysers and the high lakes. The driest desert on earth has a rainy season, and it is in summer.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average