Vitacura: Santiago's Luxury Gallery and Garden District

Vitacura occupies the northeastern corner of greater Santiago as the municipality with the highest income in Chile — a leafy, villa-lined district where the private art galleries, garden restaurants, and the designer boutiques of Avenida Alonso de Córdova have made it the country's premier destination for luxury lifestyle and contemporary art. The gallery concentration along Alonso de Córdova, sometimes called the most expensive street in Chile, presents Chilean and Latin American contemporary art in spaces of considerable quality and seriousness — not the vanity galleries of a wealthy neighbourhood but institutions with genuine curatorial vision that have established Santiago's claim to be taken seriously as a contemporary art city. The Museo de la Moda, in a 1960s house designed by Carlos Domingo, presents fashion history in a space whose architecture is itself one of Santiago's finest examples of mid-century modernism.

The restaurant culture of Vitacura represents Chilean dining at its most aspirational and often its most accomplished. The garden restaurants that operate in the neighbourhood's converted houses and purpose-built spaces — their outdoor terraces shaded by native and introduced trees in the climate that makes outdoor dining viable for most of the year — serve a clientele that expects excellence and has the income to sustain it. The Chilean fine dining scene that has emerged from Vitacura's restaurant community draws on the country's extraordinary agricultural diversity — the Atacama's unusual mineral-rich produce, the Central Valley's temperate fruit and vegetables, Patagonia's lamb and seafood — in menus that express a growing confidence in Chilean culinary identity beyond the asado and empanada traditions that represent the country internationally.

The Parque Bicentenario, created in Vitacura for Chile's 2010 bicentennial celebration, provides the neighbourhood with a public park of considerable quality — a series of lakes connected by paths through plantings of native Chilean species, a community vegetable garden, a small urban farm, and the outdoor cultural programming that public parks generate when they are well designed and actively managed. The park's north shore of the central lake, lined with weekend restaurants and cafés operating from outdoor installations, has become one of Santiago's finest weekend leisure destinations, attracting visitors from across the metropolitan area who appreciate the combination of natural beauty, quality food, and the visual coherence of a well-executed landscape project.