The rain that had been threatening all morning finally arrived just after noon, and it settled over the city with a kind of patience, the kind of rain that doesn't announce itself so much as simply become the weather. I was in Providencia, walking back from a small errand, and the drops started as a few reluctant taps on the awning above a café, then spread across the pavement in that way winter rain does here. I ducked into a doorway and watched the street empty, and I thought about how different this felt from the first day I arrived, when the airport was a blur of forms and queues and the city was just a place I needed to exist in.
Today, the last full day, everything has a slightly different texture. I spent the morning going through the flat I'd rented for the week, sorting the things I'd bought since landing, deciding what would come north with me in the backpack and what would be left behind. The flat was a modest one-bedroom in Providencia, the kind of place many people starting out here would rent, and the monthly cost, I'd been told, would be around four hundred and fifty thousand pesos, which in dollars is about four hundred and eighty. For a capital city, that kind of figure puts things in perspective. It's not cheap, but it's not the Santiago of reputation either. It's just a city where people live.
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a room when you know you're leaving it. I sat on the edge of the bed for a while, looking at the folded clothes, the small pile of receipts, the unopened bag of coffee I'd bought on a whim at a shop near the Bellavista bridge. I didn't open it. I just left it there on the small table, a gift for whoever comes next.
By early afternoon the rain had slowed to a fine mist, and I decided to take one last walk through the city I'd be leaving in the morning. I walked from Providencia down toward the river, the same stretch I'd covered on my first day, but slower now, noticing different things. The way the pavement gleams after several hours of rain. The way the winter air carries the smell of wet earth and the faint, sweet smoke of wood fires from somewhere up in the hills.
I crossed the Mapocho at the bridge near the Fine Arts museum, and the water below was high and grey, moving fast. A few joggers were out, and a man was walking his dog along the bank with a plastic bag in his hand, doing that universal thing of being a person with a dog in a city. I stood on the bridge for a while, just watching the water move, and I thought about how the river is the city's nervous system, the thing that runs underneath everything, carrying the meltwater from the cordillera down through the valley and out toward the sea.
From the bridge it's a short walk to the Parque Forestal, and I followed the path under the plane trees, their branches bare in the winter light. The whole city feels different in winter, of course, but Santiago in particular seems to pull itself inward, to huddle around its cafes and its markets, its warm interiors. The cost of a coffee, a cappuccino or a café en leche, runs about two thousand six hundred pesos, let's say three dollars. That's the price of a quiet hour in a warm room, and in this city, in August, it feels like a bargain.
I had a plan for the afternoon, such as it was. I wanted to go back to Lastarria, the little barrio of galleries and bookshops and old buildings that sits just south of the forest. It was the first part of the city that felt like a neighbourhood to me, and I wanted to see it one more time, in the rain, before I left. I found a table in a small café on a side street, a place called Casa Salvo, which I'd noticed on my first day but never had time to try. The light inside was warm, and there were only a few other people, all of them reading or typing on laptops, that particular kind of silence that exists in cafés in the afternoon.
I ordered a coffee and sat by the window, watching the street. A woman in a bright yellow raincoat walked past with a bag of vegetables. Two men stood under a doorway, smoking and talking, their shoulders hunched against the damp. I thought about the week I'd spent here, the RUT and the bank account, the SIM card that now lived in my phone, the months of planning that had led to those first anxious days of bureaucratic orientation. It had all worked out, more or less, the way these things tend to, which is to say slowly and with a certain amount of confusion, but it had worked.
The coffee came, and it was good, as most coffee here is. There's a seriousness to the café culture in Santiago that I've come to appreciate. It's not about the spectacle of the thing, the latte art and the presentation. It's about the drink itself, and the time you take with it. I sat there for longer than I needed to, not reading, not writing, just letting the afternoon pass in that unhurried way.
When I left the café, the rain had stopped completely, and the light had changed to that amber, low-slung winter light that seems to come from everywhere at once. I walked through the streets of Lastarria, past the old houses and the small galleries, and I ended up back at the Plaza de Armas, the historic heart of the city, where the cathedral stands and the Correo Central still processes the city's mail from its grand old building. The plaza was busy, as it always is, with families and office workers and the usual hawkers selling empanadas and small trinkets. I bought an empanada from a street cart, the classic one, empanada de pino, filled with beef and onion and a single olive, and it cost me about two thousand pesos, maybe two and a half. Less than three dollars for a meal, eaten standing up in a plaza in a capital city, watching the world go by.
I ate the empanada slowly, standing near the fountain, and I thought about all the walking I'd done since I arrived. The metro, with its Bip! card and its rush-hour crowds, the fares running about eight hundred pesos a trip, the monthly cap making longer stays feel manageable. The long walks through the eastern barrios, Las Condes with its towers, Providencia with its cafes. The day I spent at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which is free, and which I think every visitor and every resident should experience at least once, not because it's easy, but because it's essential. The city has a memory, and it carries it with a kind of quiet dignity.
I finished the empanada and wiped my fingers on a napkin, and I decided to take the metro one last time, not because I needed to go anywhere in particular, but because I wanted to feel that particular rhythm again, the click of the turnstile, the low hum of the trains, the press of bodies in the carriage. I rode Line 1 from the centre out toward the east, watching the city change through the windows, the old buildings giving way to the glass towers of the financial district, the crowds thinning as the line climbed gently toward the foothills of the cordillera.
I got off at the station near the end of the line, not far from where the Los Dominicos handicraft market sits, and I walked up a quiet street until I found a viewpoint. The sun was low over the city, casting long shadows across the valley, and behind the towers of Las Condes and Vitacura, the mountains rose, grey and white in the winter evening. The cordillera. It's always there, even when you can't see it, a presence that frames the city and reminds you, constantly, of what lies beyond. I stood there for a long time, just watching the light fade on the snowfields high above, and I felt the strange contentment that comes at the end of a journey's first stage.
The bus north leaves early in the morning, from the terminal, heading up the Pan-American corridor toward the Elqui Valley and, beyond that, the desert coast and the Atacama. I have a ticket, and a bag, and a general sense of where I'm going, which feels like enough. There's a pull toward the north, toward the high-altitude silence of the altiplano, toward the landscapes I've been reading about for years, the ones that appear in the pre-Columbian textiles and the poetry of this country, the Atacama as a place that existed long before any of us were here to name it.
But tonight, I'm still in Santiago. I walked back through the eastern streets as the evening deepened, past the restaurants and the bars beginning to fill with people, and I stopped for a beer in a small place near my flat. A local draft, half a litre, about three thousand pesos, three dollars, and it tasted like the end of something and the beginning of something else. I thought about the week, about the rain and the river and the museums and the markets, about the process of becoming, slowly, less of a visitor and more of a resident. It's a strange thing, this halflife of the traveller who stays, and I don't fully understand it yet. But I'm beginning to.
Back at the flat, I packed the last of my things and checked the window one more time. The city lights stretched out below, and above them, barely visible through the haze and the clouds, the mountains. I turned off the lamp, and the room went dark, and I lay there in the quiet, listening to the distant hum of the city, the last night in Santiago. In the morning, I go north. But for now, this is where I am, and that's enough.
If you're planning a trip to Santiago, or if you're thinking about spending a few months here, let me leave you with this. The city is not difficult, once you get the rhythm. The visa rules, for most Western nationalities, are straightforward, ninety days without much fuss, as long as you keep that entry slip safe. The public transit will take you just about anywhere you need to go, and the cost of a day, a meal, a coffee, is well within range of what you'd pay back home, sometimes less. But what stays with you, I think, is not the logistics. It's the feeling of the place, the light, the mountains, the unhurried pace of a winter afternoon by the river. Santiago is a city you return to, and I have a feeling I'll be returning to it many times, in many seasons, in all the years that come. For now, the bus is waiting. Hasta pronto.
This is Tomás Fuentes in Santiago, Chile. Thanks for walking with me through this first week. Next stop, the north.