Before going to Santiago de Chile, a lot of people told us “Ah, you’ll see, it’s nothing there. Just a big business center!” or “Santiago? Oh no! Don’t stay there longer than a day! It’s horrible!”. Even our guidebook made us believe that Santiago was not worth the effort saying that “you shouldn’t spend too much time here” or “Santiago shouldn’t be the highlight of your stay in Chile”.

But we actually proved all those people and the guidebook are wrong: we think Santiago is worth the detour. You just have to do the effort to go out and find the nice places and neighbourhoods and you will find out that Santiago actually has quite a lot to offer.

First of all it has the most interesting museum on Precolumbian art (no, it’s not the art from before Colombia (as Vera thought) but the art from before the discovery of South-America by Christopher Columbus…). The museum is extremely well done and boasts some real archaeological treasures including ancient pottery and some mummies about 8000 years old (yes, that’s much older than the mummies in Egypt indeed!). It definitely was a good start for the exploration of Chile, as it made us understand some of the “basics” in Chilean ancient history which would help us on our travels north.

We had the luck to find a company called “La Bicicleta Verde” which made us discover Santiago in a less standard way: by bicycle! We did two tours with them, one more political and economic (which wasn’t a bad idea as we learned about more recent Chilean history) and a, let’s call it “sociological tour” in which we cruised through the Bohemian neighbourhood (awed at the real artwork on some houses) where Pablo Neruda had one of his houses, and then visited different markets, including the biggest one in Chile: Feria La Vega.

We also learned about an important social phenomenon in Santiago, which is called “Café con Piernas” and freely translated as “Coffee with Legs”. No your coffee is not served in a cup on micro-legs running all over the place… Café con Piernas are coffee houses where the coffee is served by scarcely dressed girls. It’s a bit a macho thing, because it’s especially popular with businessmen getting their morning coffee served, but it’s highly popular and definitely a thing to do when we will get back to Chile one day, as, to Jean-Christophe’s OUTMOST regret, we didn’t have time to fit this into our stay.

Vera & Jean-Christophe