Don't Skip Santiago

The Ritz-Carlton is located in a recently developed business district festooned with interesting new buildings with unusual shapes and sleek glass and steel skin. New high-rises alternate with lower buildings to preserve view corridors and a sense of human scale. Café Melba, an eclectic, quirky place run by New Zealand expat Dell Taylor, who also owns the well-regarded Pacific Rim fusion restaurant Akarana, is located near the Ritz-Carlton; the El Golf subway station is right outside the hotel.

Santiago's Metro subway system is modern, safe, clean and cheap. Santiago is reasonably priced, though Chile's prosperity has brought higher First World prices, especially compared with neighboring Argentina. The Metro stitches together the sprawling city, and stops at the main University of Chile campus, the Moneda presidential palace, the symbolic heart of town at the Plaza de Armas and near the Mercado Central -- the touristy but fun wrought-iron central market, which was imported piece by piece from England and assembled in Chile in the 19th century.

The Moneda, which earned worldwide notoriety when Chile's armed forces bombarded the building in a 1973 military coup, is today an attractive relic. You can't enter the gorgeous main building but can meander through the colonial-style inner courtyard, filled with imaginative contemporary art pieces. The Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda museum is located underneath the Moneda's outer plaza.

The lungs of Santiago, its major green parks, follow the bends of the Mapocho River, which flows through the city, and offer views from high points such as Cerro San Cristobal, which can be reached by two-seater cable cars.

Just north of the river, the Bellavista district offers block after block of crowded bars, music clubs and restaurants. Bellavista also contains one of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda's houses; it's now an eccentric museum, enlivened with art and mementos from Neruda's world travels.

Our favorite museum was the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, located off the Plaza de Armas, the lively public square laid out by the Spaniards in 1541. Located in the eye-pleasing, circa 1807 former Royal Customs House, the small but fine museum displays a trove of pre-Colombian art, recovered from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego -- a pleasing reminder of how creative and diverse the Americas were before Europe's Age of Exploration.