The 11 Best Travel Experiences in Chile

Three granite towers punch straight up out of Chilean Patagonia, reflected in turquoise glacial lakes that change colour with the light.

The full W trek links the towers with glaciers, wind-battered forests and the vivid blue of the Grey Glacier over several days.

Even a single day at the base-of-the-towers viewpoint delivers one of South America's most dramatic landscapes.

Roughly 900 moai, the monumental stone figures carved by the Rapa Nui between the 13th and 16th centuries, are scattered across this small volcanic island 3,700km from mainland Chile.

The best-known cluster, fifteen restored moai at Ahu Tongariki, catches the sunrise directly behind it.

Elsewhere, the Rano Raraku quarry has dozens of unfinished statues still half-buried in the hillside where their carvers left them.

A 4-5 day traverse of Torres del Paine's signature sights: the granite Torres themselves, the sheer Cuernos horns, French Valley's hanging glaciers, and Grey Glacier's blue ice.

Refugios and campsites break the route into manageable days, though Patagonian wind can turn brutal without warning.

The reward is one of the most consistently spectacular multi-day trails in South America, from lenga forest to turquoise glacial lakes.

One of South America's most active volcanoes, a near-perfect snow-capped cone above the lakeside town of Pucon, with a permanently active lava lake sometimes visible glowing from the crater rim on clear nights.

A full-day guided climb in crampons reaches the summit for a look directly into the smoking crater, while at night the volcano's silhouette glowing faintly red is visible from town.

Ski slopes cover its lower flanks in winter, an unusual pairing of active volcanism and alpine sport.

A vast basin of white salt crust and brine lagoons mirrors the Andes, with flamingo colonies wading in mineral-pink pools.

Otherworldly geology in the driest non-polar desert on Earth, with almost no vegetation, cracked salt crust underfoot, and only the wind and distant volcanoes for company.

A labyrinth of marble caverns carved by wave action into a peninsula on Lake General Carrera, forming swirled chambers and arches in white, grey, and cobalt blue.

Accessible only by small boat, with the water's color and the marble's pattern shifting dramatically with the season and light.

Wind and ancient salt deposits have carved this stretch of the Atacama Desert into ridges, dunes and a natural amphitheatre that genuinely resembles a lunar landscape, 13km from San Pedro de Atacama inside the Los Flamencos National Reserve.

At sunset the salt-crusted rock turns deep red and violet, drawing every tour van in town to the same handful of viewpoints.

By day it's simply one of the driest, starkest places on Earth.

Chile's main historic port climbs steep hills above the Pacific, linked by century-old funiculars and dense with painted houses and street art.

UNESCO listed the old quarter for its unplanned layout, and wandering the stairways of Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, plus Pablo Neruda's clifftop house La Sebastiana, is the main activity.

Parts of the city have visibly declined, and the port is still working, not polished.

A hypersaline lagoon in the Atacama salt flat, dense enough with dissolved minerals that swimmers float effortlessly, Dead Sea-style.

Ringed by pale salt crust and distant volcanoes, it's a strange, buoyant swim in one of the driest places on Earth, best paired with a freshwater rinse straight after.

Running since 1960, this is Latin America's oldest and largest music festival, staged each February in the open-air Quinta Vergara amphitheatre and broadcast live to millions across the region.

Beyond the competing new songs it's named for, its nightly bill of major Spanish-language headliners has made it a career-defining stage, alongside a notoriously blunt audience known for booing acts off stage.

Chile's capital sits in a wide valley with the snow-capped Andes rising directly behind its skyline, a backdrop few capitals can match on a clear day.

The colonial core around Plaza de Armas, the funicular up Cerro San Cristóbal, and the restaurants of Bellavista give it a couple of solid days' worth of things to do.

Most travellers treat it as a stopover before Atacama or Patagonia rather than a destination itself.