Chile · Travel guide
11 Best Places to Visit in Chile, North to South (2026)
The best places to visit in Chile, from the Atacama Desert to Torres del Paine, with how to reach each one from Santiago and the months that suit it.
This is the reasoning we use when we date a trip, not an article written to fill a blog. The Chile itineraries it feeds are here.
The best places to visit in Chile sit at opposite ends of a very long country: the Atacama Desert in the north and Torres del Paine in Patagonia are the two that matter most, with Easter Island far out in the Pacific, and the Lake District, Chiloé and the Carretera Austral in between. Almost every trip starts in Santiago, and the real question is how many of these a single journey can hold, because most of them are a flight apart.
These are the places to visit in Chile that we send travellers to, eleven of them from north to south, with how you get to each one from Santiago and what each needs. Distances and flight times come from Chile’s tourism board, the airlines and the public works ministry, linked where we use them.
The 11 places at a glance
The table puts the main Chile tourist attractions side by side, with the journey from the capital and the number of nights we plan for each.
| Place | From Santiago | Days we give it |
|---|---|---|
| Atacama Desert | Flight to Calama, about 2 h, then 100 km by road | 4 |
| Elqui Valley | Flight to La Serena, about 1 h | 2 |
| Santiago | You land here | 1 to 2 |
| Valparaíso | 120 km by road, about 1 h 30 | 1 |
| Wine valleys | Casablanca 80 km, Colchagua 180 km | 1 to 2 |
| Lake District | Flight to Puerto Montt, 1 h 45 | 3 |
| Chiloé | Flight to Castro, about 2 h | 2 to 3 |
| Carretera Austral | Flight to Balmaceda, then road | 5 or more |
| Torres del Paine | Flight to Punta Arenas or Puerto Natales | 4 |
| Punta Arenas | Flight, about 3 h 20 | 1 to 2 |
| Easter Island | Flight, about 5 h 30 | 4 |
1. Atacama, the high desert in the north
The Atacama is one of the best places to visit in Chile for anyone who has not seen a high desert. You fly from Santiago to Calama, about two hours according to the airline SKY, and then drive 100 km to San Pedro de Atacama, which Chile’s tourism board puts at an hour and a half. The village sits above 2,400 m, and the excursions climb much higher: the Valle de la Luna at sunset, the salt flat and its flamingo lagoons, and the El Tatio geysers before dawn.
Altitude decides the order of the days, so we give it four nights. The tourism board also warns that between December and March the altiplanic winter brings rain, storms and possible road closures to the main sites. Our Atacama desert map has every place around San Pedro with its altitude and distance.
2. The Elqui Valley, for the night sky
Inland from La Serena, a one-hour flight from Santiago, the Elqui Valley has, in the tourism board’s words, more than 300 clear nights a year. It is where we send people who want an observatory visit without the altitude of the Atacama. Two nights are enough.
3. Santiago
Most trips begin and end in the capital, and the airport is 17 km from the centre. One full day covers the old centre, the hills of San Cristóbal and Santa Lucía, and the markets. We treat Santiago as the hinge of the itinerary rather than a destination, because the flights to the north and to the south both leave from it.
4. Valparaíso
The port city on its hills, with funiculars and painted houses, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003. Chile’s tourism board gives the drive from Santiago along Route 68 as 120 km, about an hour and a half, so it works as a day trip or a single night.
Painted houses on one of Valparaíso’s hills. Photo by Gabrielinfante92, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
5. The wine valleys: Casablanca and Colchagua
Two of Chile’s best known wine regions are a day out from Santiago. The Casablanca valley is about 80 km along Route 68, on the way to Valparaíso, which is why we often combine the two. Colchagua is further: its main town, Santa Cruz, is 180 km south of Santiago, and it deserves a night.
6. The Lake District
The Lake District is the green middle of Chile, a region of volcanoes, lakes and small towns. From Santiago you fly to Puerto Montt in about an hour and 45 minutes and drive 22 km to Puerto Varas, on Lake Llanquihue. Across the water stands the Osorno volcano, 2,652 m high according to CONAF, Chile’s forest service, inside Vicente Pérez Rosales, the oldest national park in the country, created in 1926.
Further north, Pucón sits below the Villarrica volcano, which the tourism board gives as 2,847 m. Three nights in the Lake District is our usual count, and it is the natural place to break a long journey between the Atacama and Patagonia.
7. Chiloé
The island south of Puerto Montt has its own culture and its wooden churches, which UNESCO listed as World Heritage in 2000. There are direct flights from Santiago to Castro of about two hours, according to the tourism board.
8. The Carretera Austral and the marble caves
The Carretera Austral is the road through Chile’s wildest region, Aysén. Chile’s public works ministry gives its length as about 1,058 km, from Puerto Montt to Villa O’Higgins, and it is the main reason travellers fly to Aysén. Its best known stop is the Marble Caves on General Carrera lake, the largest lake in Chile at 1,850 km², reached by boat from Puerto Río Tranquilo on a trip of about two hours. The tourism board puts the village 240 km by road from Balmaceda airport.
This is a road trip of five days or more, and we only recommend it to travellers who are happy with long driving days and changeable weather.
9. Torres del Paine
Torres del Paine is the most visited of Chile’s national parks with foreign travellers. Chile’s statistics institute counted 289,745 visitors in 2018, and 39 per cent of the foreigners who visited a national park in Chile that year went there. CONAF describes a park of 227,298 hectares, created in 1959 around the Paine massif, which rises to 3,050 m.
You reach it by flying to Punta Arenas or to Puerto Natales, the base town for the park. One thing to know for the coming summer: Chile’s public works ministry is repairing the runway at Puerto Natales, and between January and March 2027 commercial flights will run only from Friday to Sunday. For the season and the weather month by month, see our guide to the best time to visit Patagonia.
We give the park four nights, one of them in Puerto Natales. Our Atacama and Patagonia route joins this park and the desert in 13 days, and if you want the Argentine side as well, the Perito Moreno glacier is a day away by road: our Chile and Argentina Patagonia trip crosses the border for it.
10. Punta Arenas and the penguins of Isla Magdalena
Punta Arenas, on the Strait of Magellan, is about three hours and 20 minutes from Santiago by air according to JetSMART. Its reason for a night is Isla Magdalena, 35 km away, where CONAF protects about 7,000 pairs of Magellanic penguins. Boats go from October to mid-April, only with guides certified by CONAF, and the stay on the island lasts at most one hour. The monument closes in winter and its page currently carries a bird-flu notice, so we check it before every booking.
11. Easter Island
Rapa Nui is 3,700 km out in the Pacific, a flight of about five and a half hours from Santiago according to Chile’s tourism board. Rapa Nui National Park has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995. Visiting has two rules worth knowing before you plan: you need a park ticket and a guide accredited by Ma’u Henua, the park administration, to enter the sites, according to the park’s own page; and the ticket is valid for ten consecutive days, with one entry each to the Orongo village and the Rano Raraku quarry. Four nights let you see the main sites without rushing.
How to combine them in one trip
Chile is so long that a trip has to choose. These are the combinations we plan most, in our view the ones that use the flights well:
| Trip length | What fits | What you leave out |
|---|---|---|
| 7 days | Santiago and Valparaíso, plus the Atacama or Torres del Paine | The other end of the country |
| 10 days | Santiago, the Atacama and Torres del Paine | The Lake District |
| 14 days | The Atacama, the Lake District and Torres del Paine | Easter Island |
| 18 days or more | All of the above plus Easter Island or Chiloé | Very little |
Most of the things to do in Chile fit into those four shapes. For how the rest of South America fits around a Chile trip, see our guide to the best places to visit in South America, and for the commercial side, the trips we run, our Chile tours.
Asked before booking
The questions we get on this
- What is the number one tourist attraction in Chile?
- Torres del Paine National Park. The national statistics institute of Chile counted 289,745 visitors there in 2018, and 39 per cent of the foreign visitors to Chile's national parks that year went to Torres del Paine. The Atacama Desert around San Pedro and Easter Island are the next names on most lists.
- What is the most beautiful part of Chile?
- It depends on the kind of beauty. For mountains and glaciers, Torres del Paine in the far south. For colour and silence, the Atacama Desert in the north, with its salt flat and high lagoons. For lakes and snow-capped volcanoes with gentler weather, the Lake District around Puerto Varas.
- Is 7 days enough in Chile?
- Enough for one region done well, not for the country. Chile is so long that the Atacama and Patagonia are two separate flights from Santiago. With seven days, pick the Atacama or Torres del Paine and add Santiago and Valparaíso. With ten to fourteen days you can do both ends.