Parque Forestal Santiago: Museums, Culture & the City's Green Heart

Parque Forestal is Santiago's most culturally rich green space — a long linear park stretching beside the Mapocho River that serves simultaneously as civic park, outdoor gallery, cultural corridor, and the informal living room of Santiago's creative class. The park's tree-lined promenades were laid out by French landscape architect Georges Dubois in 1900, and the mature plane and jacaranda trees now create a leafy canopy entirely unlike the rest of this Andean city.

The park is flanked by two of Santiago's finest cultural institutions. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes — housed in a magnificent Beaux-Arts building modelled on the Petit Palais in Paris — contains Chile's most important fine art collection with excellent permanent galleries of Chilean modernism and Latin American 20th-century painting. The adjacent Museo de Arte Contemporáneo focuses on contemporary Chilean artists. Both are free on Sundays.

The Barrio Lastarria and Barrio Bellas Artes neighbourhoods on the southern edge of the park have become Santiago's most enjoyable pedestrian areas — bookshops, vintage record stores, artisan markets, specialty coffee, and excellent restaurant terraces spread out along the park's edge. The Mercado Lastarria street food market operates on weekends. For the full experience, arrive on a Sunday morning when joggers, families, jazz musicians, and artists share the paths in a distinctly Latin American version of urban park life.