Walking Santiago out from under the fog

The map starts blank and stays that way until your feet change it. Santiago gives you a compact colonial grid to start with and fifteen kilometres of city running east from it.

A grid on a valley floor, mountains at the end of the street

The old centre is a Spanish colonial grid, regular and easy, and small enough to cross in half an hour. Plaza de Armas is the origin point. Paseo Ahumada and Paseo Huerfanos run out of it as pedestrian streets, and the Alameda, officially Avenida Libertador Bernardo O Higgins, cuts across the south edge of it from east to west.

The ground is close to flat, tilting up so gradually toward the cordillera that you only feel it on the walk home. At the end of most eastward streets, on a clear day, is a wall of mountains standing over the roofline. It is the single most useful navigational feature in the city, and the reason nobody in Santiago ever really needs a compass.

Two hills and a river

Two hills interrupt the flat. Cerro Santa Lucia is a small volcanic outcrop right in the centre, terraced with paths and staircases and worth twenty minutes. Cerro San Cristobal is far bigger, an entire park rising out of the middle of the city, and walking up from Pio Nono in Bellavista is a solid hour of steady climbing with the whole basin opening out below you.

The Mapocho runs along the north side of the centre, and the parks strung along its banks, Parque Forestal, Parque Balmaceda and Parque de los Reyes, make the best continuous walking corridor in Santiago. You can follow that green line for several kilometres without ever waiting at a light.

An afternoon from Plaza de Armas to San Cristobal

Start at Plaza de Armas, walk down Ahumada, then climb Cerro Santa Lucia for the view. Come down the east side into Lastarria, follow Parque Forestal beside the river, and cross at Pio Nono into Bellavista, where the streets are low and painted and the bars start early. Climb San Cristobal to the top. On the way down, carry on east into Providencia and follow Avenida Providencia as far as your legs allow. Ten kilometres, one real climb, and it takes in the four parts of the city anyone would actually want.

Smog, heat and how the map fills

Santiago fills in as a long stripe. The centro grid goes quickly because it is compact and rectilinear, and a few evenings will clear most of it. After that, the city runs east along one continuous axis, Alameda into Providencia into Apoquindo, for something like fifteen kilometres out to Las Condes. Your map grows in that direction more than any other, and it ends up looking like a bar rather than a blob. North and south, the comunas sprawl for miles, so the overall percentage stays modest even while the middle looks well filled.

Winter is the real constraint. The city sits in a basin between the Andes and the coastal range, and thermal inversion holds the smog in it from roughly May to August. On the bad days the mountains vanish and a long walk is not a sensible plan. Summer is dry and hot, into the thirties, but the air is clean and the evenings run late. April, with the light going gold and the air finally clear, is the best walking month of the year here.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

FOG is free to explore. No account, no subscription, and your map never leaves your phone.

free to explore · one purchase unlocks everything · never a subscription