I'd ridden the creaky, 80-year-old funicular up Cerro San Cristobal, the highest point in Santiago, and then, with my sweat-soaked shirt clinging to my back in the December heat, I climbed a few hundred steps to the base of the colossal white statue of La Virgen de la Inmaculada Concepción that crowns the 529-foot-high summit, her arms outstretched beseechingly.
It was a commanding viewpoint, or at least it could have been. But on this afternoon, like on so many, brown haze smothered the panorama. Then, as if on cue, invisible hands parted the curtain of smog briefly and I got what I'd come for: a giddying view of the ice-encrusted, 20,000-foot-high Andes towering majestically just beyond the city limits. Instantly I felt cooler.
It was only a glimpse, but it was well worth the trouble. And that's how I came to think of my brief visit to Santiago: Travelers tend to view it merely as a transit point en route to Patagonia, the Lake District or the Atacama desert, but adding a day or two here for a quick glimpse can be very rewarding.
Admittedly, Chile's capital doesn't have the hot-blooded reputation of Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires. Visitors have been comparing it unfavorably to the latter since at least 1835, when Charles Darwin commented: "It is not so fine or so large as Buenos Aires, but it is built after the same plan."
If Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America, Santiago today might be the Zurich. Home of one-third of Chile's 18 million people, it's arguably the tidiest, most efficient, easiest-to-navigate major city in South America, and one of the most prosperous. It's a good place to ease your way into Latin America. And with its lively and picturesque fish market, poet Pablo Neruda's delightfully strange house, a slightly smaller version of Buenos Aires' famous Recoleta cemetery and a good collection of museums and colonial buildings, it kept me more than busy during my two days here.
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