The summit belongs to a sanctuary dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, inaugurated in 1908. Its centerpiece is the white statue of the Virgin, 14 meters tall atop an 8.3-meter pedestal, weighing more than 36,000 kilograms. Within that pedestal hides a small chapel, and on April 1, 1987, Pope John Paul II knelt there to pray and bless the city spread out below him. An amphitheater at the statue's feet hosts open-air masses, the congregation seated with the entire valley as their backdrop. At night the floodlights catch her, and from the streets far below she seems to hover, a pale figure suspended over a sea of city lights.

Faith was not the hill's first calling. In 1903 astronomers arrived, installing the Mills Observatory near the summit, a southern station built as an offshoot of the famous Lick Observatory in California, funded by the philanthropist Darius Ogden Mills to survey the southern sky. Known today as the Manuel Foster Observatory, it made Cerro San Cristóbal a place for studying the heavens before it became a place for praying to them. There is something fitting in the pairing: a hill that draws the eye upward, used first to chart the stars and then to honor the divine, both pursuits asking the same thing of anyone who climbs it, which is simply to look up.

Cerro San Cristóbal holds the city's largest public park, the sprawling Santiago Metropolitan Park, a wedge of forest and trails rising out of the dense neighborhoods around it. At its foot sit the Chilean National Zoo and a serene Japanese garden, while higher up two municipal swimming pools, Tupahue and Antilén, offer a cool plunge with a panoramic view. On weekends the slopes fill with joggers, cyclists, and families escaping the apartment blocks below. In a city pressed tight against the Andes, this single forested hill is the lung where Santiago comes to breathe.

Reaching the summit is half the experience, and there are many ways to do it. The energetic walk up in about 45 minutes, climbing 300 meters from the streets of bohemian Barrio Bellavista. Others ride the historic Funicular de Santiago, whose base sits beside the zoo at the north end of Pío Nono. A cable car offers a third route, though it has had a troubled history. The original line ran from 1980 until 2009, when the gearbox controlling its speed exploded and left the system unusable. The years that followed were a saga of frustration: a tender opened in 2011 drew only a single bid, which was rejected, and a fresh public contest had to be launched in 2013. Finally, in December 2014, officials announced a full overhaul. A 9.5-million-dollar program of works delivered a new 46-cabin network, eight of those cabins fitted to carry bicycles, strollers, or wheelchairs, each holding up to six passengers, and the cable car reopened in November 2016. Whether you climb, ride, or glide, the reward is the same, the whole of Santiago laid out beneath the Andes.