The Andes dominate Santiago's eastern horizon when the air is clear - a wall of rock and ice visible from every elevated point in the city. The ski resorts of Valle Nevado and Portillo lie within two hours of the city center, their slopes drawing Santiaguinos and international visitors to southern hemisphere winter sports. The Cajon del Maipo, the canyon that drains the mountains east of the city, offers hiking and hot springs accessible for day trips.

The mountains that beautify Santiago also threaten it. The seismic zone where the Nazca Plate subducts beneath South America produces earthquakes that have repeatedly damaged the city - most recently in 2010, when an 8.8 magnitude quake killed over 500 people nationally. The Andean snowpack provides Santiago's water; climate change that reduces that snowpack threatens the city's supply. The mountains are backdrop and lifeline and hazard, defining the city from every direction.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military overthrew President Salvador Allende, bombing La Moneda palace and initiating seventeen years of dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. The coup killed thousands immediately; the regime's subsequent repression killed, tortured, or disappeared tens of thousands more. The Estadio Nacional was used as a concentration camp; the Villa Grimaldi as a torture center; the bodies of victims were thrown into the sea from helicopters.

Santiago still processes this history. La Moneda has been rebuilt; the Memory and Human Rights Museum documents the atrocities; the Villa Grimaldi is now a memorial park. But Pinochet's economic reforms - the privatizations, the pension system, the free-market policies - remain partly in place, their defenders arguing that Chile's subsequent prosperity justifies the dictatorship that imposed them. The debates are not resolved; the wounds have not healed; September 11 means something different in Chile than it does in the United States.

Santiago's neighborhoods reveal its class geography. The barrio alto - the upper neighborhoods climbing toward the mountains - holds the wealth: Vitacura, Las Condes, Lo Barnechea, with their shopping malls and gated communities. The western and southern comunas hold the working and middle classes, their density increasing as income decreases. The contrast is visible from Cerro San Cristóbal: green gardens and swimming pools to the east, concrete and informal settlements to the south and west.

Bellavista and Lastarria are the bohemian districts, their restaurants and galleries attracting artists and tourists to neighborhoods that gentrification has transformed. The Mercado Central sells seafood in a iron-frame building that dates to 1872; the Barrio Brasil offers Art Nouveau architecture and dive bars. The barrios give Santiago texture that its modern business districts lack, the city revealing itself neighborhood by neighborhood.

The valleys that surround Santiago produce some of South America's best wines, the Mediterranean climate and Andean irrigation creating conditions that European grape varieties thrive in. The Maipo Valley south of the city is known for Cabernet Sauvignon; the Casablanca Valley to the west for Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. The wineries that have developed since Chile's economic opening in the 1980s range from boutique operations to industrial producers exporting globally.

Wine tourism has become a significant draw, the vineyards accessible for day trips from Santiago, their restaurants and tasting rooms catering to visitors seeking experiences beyond the city. The landscape of the wine country - the neat rows of vines, the Andean backdrop, the haciendas converted to visitor centers - provides relief from urban density. Chilean wine's international reputation has grown with quality; the wines that once seemed bargains now compete with established regions.

Santiago's air pollution is legendary in Latin America, the combination of geography and emissions creating winter inversions that trap pollutants against the mountains. The valley that holds the city has poor ventilation; the diesel buses and vehicle fleet produce particulate matter; the wood-burning stoves that heat poorer neighborhoods add smoke. The result is air quality that triggers health emergencies multiple times each winter.

The government has tried solutions - vehicle restrictions, metro expansion, catalytic converter requirements, wood-burning bans - with partial success. The worst days are fewer than they were in the 1990s, but the problem persists. The smog is visible from the sky and invisible from the ground on the worst days, when the mountains disappear behind gray haze and residents are warned to limit outdoor activity. Santiago's prosperity has not solved the pollution that prosperity produces.