Beneath the Andes — Pisco Sour, Mercado Central seafood, world-class wine at $5 a glass, and Latin America's most transformed food city
Chile's capital sits in a valley between the Pacific and the Andes (the snow-capped peaks rise visibly to 6,900m on clear days, 70km to the east), built on land taken from the Mapuche people and rebuilt repeatedly after floods, earthquakes, and the 1973 coup. Santiago has been the most dramatically transformed major city in Latin America over the past 20 years — from a city most travelers flew through to one with a serious food scene: Mercado Central's shellfish towers (locos, machas, piure sea squirt, centolla king crab), the world's best empanadas de pino, caldillo de congrio (conger eel st…
Founded by Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia in 1541, Santiago was repeatedly burned, flooded, and attacked during the colonial period. Chile declared independence in 1818 under Bernardo O'Higgins; the country's 4,200km length (longest north-south in the world) made Santiago's centralized control a constant political tension with the far north (nitrate mining wealth) and far south (Mapuche resistance, forestry, Patagonia). The September 11, 1973 military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, backed by the Nixon administration, overthrew democratically elected Socialist president Salvador…