The airplane door opens, and the first thing that hits you is the smell of the winter air. It is sharp, a bit thin, and it carries a faint note of smoke from the thousands of wood stoves burning in the cordillera foothills. I have a backpack, a folder with a visa approval letter I spent months and most of my savings to obtain, and absolutely no idea which end of the airport bus is the front. This is Santiago, 1 August 2026, and I am here to stay.
Arturo Merino Benítez Airport, or SCL, is the only real international gateway to Chile, and it feels like it. The arrivals hall is a low, efficient hum of trolley wheels and family reunions in Spanish. I stood there for a moment, watching the meeting point where drivers hold up signs for executives from the mining companies, from the vineyards, from the salmon exporters. The glass doors slide open to an overcast sky, and the temperature is a genuine, bracing 8 degrees Celsius. The Andes are there, somewhere, hidden behind a low bank of grey cloud.
Accommodation first. I had booked a few nights at the Heidelberg Haus Apart Hotel in Providencia, a kind of central-eastern neighbourhood that is a base for most people doing exactly what I am doing. It is a quiet street, trees heavy with the damp, and the hotel itself is this slightly odd but charming Bavarian-style building that feels entirely out of place in the southern hemisphere, yet somehow works. The room has a small heater, a heavy duvet, and a window that looks out over a courtyard. The key turns, the radiator ticks, and I just sat on the bed for a while. I had arrived.
The first practical task is the big one: the RUT. Your national identification number, essentially your existence in official Chile. You can't rent a flat, open a bank account, or get a job without it. The process is straightforward, which is surprising for a Latin American bureaucracy. With my temporary residence visa activated, I was told I need to book an appointment at the Registro Civil within thirty days to get the cédula, the physical ID card. The RUT itself is issued through the SII, the tax agency. It sounds complicated, but the woman at the hostel desk, a Paraguayan who has lived here for a decade, just smiled and said, 'Tranquilo, Tomás.' The secret is the Clave Única, the digital credential that unlocks everything from tax filings to medical appointments. You get that online.
Banking is the next puzzle. Most newcomers end up at BancoEstado, specifically their free CuentaRUT account, which has the lowest barrier to entry. Anyone with a RUT and a passport can get one. I walked into a branch on Avenida Providencia, took a number, and waited. The teller was efficient, typed for a while, and then I had a bank account. Simple as that. The alternative to the traditional banks, which demand proof of income before giving you a proper current account, is a fintech app like Tenpo or Mercado Pago, which I'm told are remarkably good for day-to-day expenses. But for the long game, a real bank is the goal. I opened my CuentaRUT, which costs nothing to maintain, and I felt a little bit more real.
With the RUT and bank sorted, I needed a SIM card. The airport has kiosks for the big carriers, Entel, Movistar, Claro, and the budget option, WOM. I went with Entel, which has the best coverage in the country. You register with your passport, the law requires it, and walk out with a local number and a prepaid data plan. It costs a few thousand pesos for the starter pack, and the data is cheap. I stood on the sidewalk, holding my new phone and feeling the weight of the connection to the rest of the country. I am no longer a guest roaming on an expensive international plan. I have a number.
The second full day was for orientation. I bought a Bip! card from a machine at the metro station, an orange contactless card that works across the Santiago Metro and the Red bus network. The fare during peak hours is around 770 pesos, which is less than a dollar, so getting around is genuinely affordable. There is a monthly cap called the Monto Máximo Mensual, which limits what you spend; after about 41,000 pesos, the rides are free for the month. That is a fantastic system, the kind of thing that makes a city feel sane. I took Line 1, the main artery that runs from the east, beneath the financial district, all the way under the historic centre. The train was full of people in winter coats, scarves, headphones. The doors closed, the lights flickered, and we were off.
One thing I noticed quickly: the cordillera. The Andes are a constant presence, a wall of rock and snow that looms over the city to the east. On the cleaner days, they seem close enough to touch. There is a story going around that the recent atmospheric river dumped so much record snow that the road up to Portillo was closed, and skiers were being flown in by helicopter. That is the kind of proximity to wilderness that defines Santiago. You can work in a tower in Las Condes, the financial district they call Sanhattan, and be on a ski lift in ninety minutes. The parks reflect this, too. Cerro San Cristóbal, the big urban park, is basically a mountain in the middle of the city, with a funicular that runs up the side to a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Speaking of transport, the buses. The long-distance bus terminal is a scene of controlled chaos, but it is the real hub for travel in Chile. I went there to buy a ticket for a future leg north, to the Elqui Valley. The system is simple: you buy a ticket, the company has a gate, and you get on a coach that is surprisingly luxurious, with reclining seats and a movie playing. It is how Chileans travel. I have learned that from Santiago to La Serena is roughly a five-hour bus ride, and it costs a fraction of the airfare. I will be taking that road, finally heading out of the capital in a few weeks. But first, I need to learn the city.
Eating is essential. The Mercado Central is an 1872 iron-and-glass structure built in Scotland and shipped over, a kind of steampunk cathedral dedicated to seafood. The vendors shout, the ice shimmers, and the air is thick with the smell of the Pacific. I sat at a counter and ordered caldillo de congrio, the fish stew that Pablo Neruda wrote an ode to. A bowl of that, with warm bread, cost me about 8,000 pesos at one of the stalls. For a simple lunch at a local place, that is pretty much the going rate. I ate, watched the life of the market, and felt the history of a city that has always looked to the sea, even though the Andes wall it off.
For coffee, my new routine has already formed. There is a good specialty place up in the Lastarria neighbourhood, the kind of quarter that makes Santiago feel like a European capital. Cobblestones, art galleries, booksellers on the street. I found a small café, got a cortado, and the barista knew exactly how to pull it. That coffee cost around 2,600 pesos. I sat by the window and watched the people walk by, umbrellas half-open under a light drizzle. It was a deeply peaceful afternoon. Lastarria is where the city goes to be civilised, a block away from the sprawling and chaotic Plaza de Armas.
The Plaza de Armas is the colonial heart, founded in 1541, surrounded by the Cathedral and the Central Post Office. It is also a place that demands a certain street smarts. Santiago is a safe city by Latin American standards, especially in the eastern comunas like Providencia, Las Condes, and Vitacura. But the historic centre is a mix of everything, and you feel the energy shift after dark. The advice here is simple: keep your phone out of sight on the metro, especially at rush hour, and take an app-taxi from Uber or Cabify rather than walking down a quiet side street at midnight. I have been fine, but I have been careful. That is the balance of living here. It is not fear, it is just attention.
I took the funicular up Cerro San Cristóbal on my third day. The park itself is enormous, one of the largest urban green spaces in the world, and even in winter it is full of runners and families. A ride on the funicular, which you pay for with the same Bip! card, takes you up past the zoo, with its condors and guanacos, up to the shrine of the Virgin Mary that watches over the city. At the top, the whole of Santiago stretches below, a vast, grey expanse of low buildings punctuated by the towers of Costanera Centre. The air was clear, and I could see the snow streaks on the mountains in detail. I stood there and thought about all the journeys that begin from this point, the Pan-American highway heading north to the Atacama desert, that I will follow in the coming months.
There are two big cultural institutions that define modern Chile. The Museum of Memory and Human Rights is in Quinta Normal, and it is a necessary, sobering, and free experience. It documents the dictatorship years, and I want to go soon, but I am also bracing myself for it. It is a part of the national psyche that shadows everything, the 1973 coup, the seventeen years after, the social explosion of 2019. The country is in a weary, pragmatic mood under the Boric government, with cost-of-living and crime dominating conversations more than the constitutional process. My first week is not the time to dwell there in depth, but to know it is there is to understand the present.
On my last day of settling-in, I wandered through the Barrio Italia, a neighbourhood known for its design shops and craft workshops. I bought a small piece of lapis lazuli from a shop in Bellavista, a dark blue stone that is mined in Chile and was a favourite of the Mapuche. It was a small, quiet souvenir, nothing for the tourist pack, just something to mark the beginning. I picked up a bottle of pisco, the national spirit, and promised myself I would save it for the night I finally leave the city behind and head north to where they make it, in the Elqui Valley. The flat I am renting, a modest one-bedroom in Providencia, is about 450,000 pesos a month, a little under five hundred dollars, which feels fair for this part of the city.
So here is my first week. I have my RUT, the number that makes me a legal entity. I have a bank card, a local SIM, a transport card with some credit on it. I have eaten the stew, drunk the coffee, ridden the funicular. The winter has been grey and drizzly, but the mountains are white, and the city is alive. I am Tomás, I am in Santiago, and this is just the beginning. Next time, I will take that bus north, towards the sun.
I am sorting out my backpack for the trip, checking the bus schedule online. There is a festival in the city this weekend and the weather looks clear for the mountains, but there is so much to see where I am heading. For now, I am just living in the moment, enjoying the quiet rhythm of this new life. I will close my eyes for a second and then I will go. Oh, this is it. This is the end of the first episode. If you are passing through, start in Providencia, get your RUT and Bip! card, and take the funicular. The rest will follow. Hasta luego.