A country 4,300 kilometres long and 180 wide — driest desert on earth to glacier, without a single turn
Chile is 4,300 kilometres long and on average 180 wide, so a trip is planned in flights rather than on a map. Santiago to the Atacama is two hours north, to Patagonia three and a half south, and a fortnight picks one of the two.
The choice between north and south comes first and matters most. The north is the Atacama: the driest desert on earth, geysers at 4,300 metres, salt flats with flamingos, and the sky that explains why the world's largest telescopes are there. The south is Patagonia: Torres del Paine, ice, wind and walking. Doing both in one trip means six hours of internal flying and two days lost, so a fortnight takes one, with Santiago and Valparaíso as the joint.
Each place has its own page — what makes it worth the detour, and how long you need.
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The seasons differ between the two ends, which makes choosing easier. Torres del Paine is open all year, but November–March is the only window for hiking without a guide — outside it the O circuit is closed, and the W and day hikes require one. Since 1 May 2026 foreign entry has been split by length of stay rather than by route: €29.90 for a single day, €44.70 for two to ten days, bought in advance through the official system. The Atacama works year-round — altitude is the bigger problem there than season, since a day trip climbs from 2,400 metres at San Pedro to 4,300 at the geysers.
Most Western passports — EU, UK, US, Canadian and Australian — enter Chile visa-free for up to 90 days, with no reciprocity fee since 2026. Santiago airport (SCL), 15 km from the centre as the crow flies, is where the internal flights north and south start. Cards work everywhere; Chile is, with Uruguay, the most expensive country in the region, and that shows most in Patagonian accommodation, where a room in season is booked months ahead.
In parts of the Atacama, weather stations have logged no precipitation at all. The ground is close enough to Martian soil that NASA tests rovers there, and one stretch of desert flowered in 2015 after rain that falls once every five to seven years.
The strongest earthquake ever recorded struck Chile near Valdivia on 22 May 1960, magnitude 9.5. Its tsunami reached Japan and the Philippines. The country's building codes are, as a result, among the strictest anywhere.
Rapa Nui belongs to Chile but lies 3,500 kilometres offshore and is the most isolated inhabited place on earth. The flight from Santiago is five and a half hours — longer than Santiago to Lima, which is in another country.
Phylloxera, the louse that destroyed Europe's vineyards in the late nineteenth century, never reached Chile — desert to the north, the Andes to the east and the ocean to the west form a natural quarantine. Vines here still grow on their own roots.
Gabriela Mistral in 1945 and Pablo Neruda in 1971. Neruda's three houses — in Santiago, Valparaíso and Isla Negra — are museums now, and all three were built to feel like the inside of a ship.
Across 4,300 kilometres Chile holds both tropical desert and sub-polar tundra. The Humboldt current runs cold water up the whole coast, so penguins nest at a latitude that would be subtropical anywhere else.
This isn't a ranking — it's a route. Any one of these could carry a whole trip.
Three granite towers above a lake, and two circuits around them: the W in four to five days and the O in seven to nine. The season is November–March, camps book out months ahead, and without a booking confirmation you are not let in. Foreign entry for either circuit is €44.70.
Five and a half hours from Santiago, in the middle of the Pacific. Ahu Tongariki is a row of fifteen moai that the 1960 tsunami knocked down and a Japanese donation raised again in the nineties. Three days covers the island; the national park fee is separate and valid ten days.
A southern island with sixteen UNESCO-listed wooden churches, built with boatyard technique — no nails, jointed like a hull. Stilt houses over the water, curanto cooked in the ground, and fog that is part of the landscape rather than the weather.
Two hours south of Santiago, the heartland of carménère — a grape extinct in Europe that grew here for a century under the wrong name, as merlot. It was identified only in 1994. A wine train and bicycle tours solve the problem of driving after a tasting.
A perfect cone above Lake Llanquihue, in country settled by Germans in the mid-nineteenth century — hence the cakes and timber houses in Puerto Varas. From here you cross into Argentine Bariloche by boat and bus through three lakes.
Chile is over four thousand kilometres long and on average about a hundred and seventy wide. Laid over Europe it would stretch from Oslo to the Sahara.
Chile also holds Easter Island, over three and a half thousand kilometres from the mainland. The nearest inhabited neighbour is two thousand kilometres away.
Short answers to what people ask most before setting out.
They can, expensively: six hours of internal flying, two days spent moving, and two seasons that do not overlap neatly. A realistic fortnight takes one of them, with Santiago and Valparaíso added on.
All year, but hiking without a guide only runs November to March — outside that the O circuit is closed and the W and day hikes need one. Camps and refuges book out months ahead and multi-day routes are not open to you without a confirmation. Since 1 May 2026 the park charges by length of stay (one day, or two to ten), replacing the old under/over-three-days split — check the current system before buying.
Three nights is the minimum: day one the Valle de la Luna before sunset, at the village's own altitude; day two the Salar de Atacama with its flamingos and the Miscanti and Miñiques lagoons; day three the Tatio geysers, which start at four in the morning. Two nights drops the geysers, which is a shame since they are the reason people come.
Keep going — these destinations and stories pair well with this one.
The whole of Chile fits into one query — six questions and you know which of them suits you.
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All photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are used under the licence stated beside each one.
