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The last morning in Santiago is the quietest one yet. I woke before the alarm, which felt right, and stood at the window of the flat in Providencia watching the city come to life in that pale winter light. The cordillera was out, sharp against a sky that was trying to decide between blue and grey. I made coffee, standing in the kitchen, and thought about how strange it is to pack a bag you only just finished unpacking.

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There's a particular feeling to the final day in a place, a kind of double vision. You see everything for what it is, but also for what you'll remember it being. I walked down Avenida Providencia without any real purpose, just to feel the morning move around me. The cafes were opening, chairs coming out onto the pavement, that first hiss of the espresso machine. I stopped at a place called Wonderland Café, which felt like the right name for the mood, and ordered a café en leche. About two thousand six hundred pesos, give or take. Three dollars.

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I sat by the window and watched the street. August in Santiago is still winter, and you see it in the way people dress, the wool coats and scarves, the way the light stays low and soft all day. But there's something else too, a sense that the city is leaning toward spring. The jacarandas are still bare, but the plums are beginning to think about it. I finished my coffee and paid, and the girl behind the counter said something kind about the rain we'd had, and I felt, for a moment, like a person who lives here rather than a person who is visiting.

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I had one last practical thing to do, and I wanted to do it properly. I took the metro east to the end of Line 1, out to Los Dominicos, the handicraft market in Las Condes. The ride itself is worth doing once, just to feel the train come up out of the tunnels and into the open air as you head toward the foothills, the Andes suddenly filling the windows. The market is a collection of craft stalls under a big roof, wool and lapis lazuli and woodwork, and I wandered through it slowly, not looking for anything in particular.

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I bought a small piece of lapis lazuli for a friend back home, a stone the colour of the night sky over the Atacama, a place I haven't been yet but am already carrying with me. The woman who sold it wrapped it in paper and told me it was from a mine near Ovalle, north of here. Standing there in the winter sun, holding that small blue stone, I felt the first real pull of the road north. This city has been good to me, but the country is long, and the desert is waiting.

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I took the metro back into the centre, transferring at a station whose name I still can't pronounce correctly, and walked through Lastarria one last time. The barrio is small but dense, full of bookshops and galleries and little restaurants with chalkboards outside. I had a late lunch at a place called Fabula Restaurant, a quiet corner spot, and ordered a bowl of something warm and simple. About eighteen thousand pesos for a proper meal, which feels reasonable for a city that is still, by global standards, more affordable than you'd expect.

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I thought about the week I've had. The RUT, the bank account, the SIM card, all the small administrative rituals that turn a visitor into a resident. The cédula is still being printed, but the number is mine now, a string of digits that ties me to this country. I have a CuentaRUT at BancoEstado, which was the easiest account to open, and a prepaid SIM from Entel that I registered with my passport. These are the unglamorous foundations of a new life, and they matter more than any landmark.

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The city itself has been a slow reveal. The first days were about orientation, learning the metro map, figuring out the Bip! card, understanding which parts of the city feel safe at which hours. The eastern comunas, Providencia and Las Condes and Vitacura, are the ones most foreigners land in first, and they are comfortable in the way that wealth is comfortable. But the centre has its own energy, the Plaza de Armas where the city was founded in 1541, the historic buildings, the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, which every visitor should take the time to see.

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I finished my lunch and walked up toward the Parque Forestal, the long green strip that runs along the Mapocho River. The river is low in winter, a grey thread through the city, but the park is alive. Joggers, families, old men on benches reading newspapers. I sat for a while on a bench myself, watching the light change on the water, and thought about how a city's rivers are always its true arteries, carrying whatever the mountains decide to send down.

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There's something about the Mapocho that has stayed with me all week. It's not a dramatic river, not like the great rivers of Europe or even the Bio Bio further south. It's a mountain stream that happens to run through a capital, and in winter it's reduced to a trickle in places. But it's the reason the city is here, the reason the Spanish founded Santiago in this valley in 1541, sheltered by the cordillera on one side and the coastal range on the other. The river is the city's memory, and I've walked its banks enough this week to feel like I have a small share in that memory now.

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I walked back through Bellavista, past the house where Pablo Neruda lived, the one called La Chascona, with its whimsical geometry and its secret rooms. I didn't go inside this time. I'd seen it earlier in the week, and I wanted to keep it as a memory of that day, not a final-day errand. Instead I walked up the hill a little, into the streets of the barrio, past the street art and the lapis lazuli shops, and stood for a while looking at the Virgin on the summit of Cerro San Cristóbal, white against the winter sky.

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That may be the image I take away from Santiago, the one I'll hold when I'm somewhere else. The white Virgin on the hill, the city spread out below her, and beyond it all, the Andes. The cordillera is a constant presence here, a wall of stone and snow that you can't ignore. On clear days it feels close enough to touch, and on grey days it disappears entirely, and you forget it's there until the clouds lift. It's the defining fact of this valley, the thing that makes Santiago what it is.

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I took the metro back to Providencia in the late afternoon. The train was crowded, the way it always is, and I stood holding the overhead rail, watching the stations go by. I thought about the people around me, the daily rhythms of a city of almost five million. This is the great gift of spending time in a place rather than passing through it: you begin to see the pattern behind the noise, the ordinary repetitions that make a city a home.

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Back at the flat, I packed. The bag was lighter than I expected, or maybe I'm just getting used to its weight. I checked the bus schedule for the morning, the long ride north up the Pan-American corridor toward the Elqui Valley, toward the desert, toward the Atacama. There's a particular kind of anticipation that comes before a long journey, the night before you leave a place you've come to know. It's not quite sadness and not quite excitement. It's more like the feeling of a river about to leave the mountains.

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I went out one last time in the evening, down to a bar in Providencia, and ordered a pisco sour. The bar was warm and low-lit, and the drink was sharp and sweet, a taste of Chile if there ever was one. I sat at the counter and watched the room, the couples and the friends and the solitary drinkers, all of us holding our glasses in the winter night. A beer costs about three thousand pesos here, which is maybe three dollars, and a pisco sour a little more.

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The bartender asked where I was headed, and I told him north. The Elqui Valley, maybe, and then the desert. He nodded, the way Chileans do when you name a place they know, and said something about the stars there, how you can see them in a way you can't in the city. I finished my drink and paid, and stepped out into the cool night air, and the city was quiet around me. Tomorrow, a bus. Tonight, one more walk through these streets I've just begun to understand.

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I walked slowly, the way you do when you're saying goodbye to a place, even if you know you'll come back. Past the shops closing up, the restaurants still humming, the maples on Avenida Providencia moving in the night wind. The cordillera was invisible now, hidden behind the city lights, but I knew it was there. That's the thing about this place. The mountains are always there, even when you can't see them. And tomorrow I'll be heading toward them, leaving the valley, leaving the winter city, carrying Santiago with me in a way I didn't expect to.

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I stopped at the corner and looked back down the street. The flat where I'd spent the week was a small light among many. I felt, standing there in the cold, a strange sense of completion. This city received me, these streets taught me, and tomorrow the road will take me north. But I'll return to this city in other seasons, as I already know I will. Santiago is one of those places that gets under your skin slowly, the way winter light does, and once it's there, it doesn't leave.