Chile

Santiago de Chile - the city of dogs

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22/03/2015

Santiago de Chile is a home for 7,5 milion people of Chile. The rest of 6,5 milion inhabitants live in solitude parts of the country. Ancestral inhabitants, people of the Mapuche tribe are only 8% of the entire population. They have become a minority which was subsequently shift aside down the south to less hospitable parts of the country. Chilean government gave them soil to compensate for their own grounds. They are not satisfied with that and still keep on disagree.

Santiago – the city of dogs

The essential inhabitants of Santiago de Chile create dogs. You meet various breeds, sizes and grains. Paradoxically street dogs have often better life than dogs with owners. People take care of the street dogs, bring them food and donate money for building dog kennels for them. There are about 400.000 dogs in the capital. People like them mainly because the dogs are a symbol of all protests and they usually walk in the first line. And they have another thing in common with locals – they also do not like policemen.

Culinary art

Santiago de Chile is situated close to the Pacific Ocean. Therefore is daily supplied with fresh fish from Valparaiso and surroundings. You can buy the fish in local fish market. And the advantage is that there are many restaurants inside the market so you can relish on fresh fish and seafood for very small amount of money. We tried it and it was delicious. Most of all we enjoyed the crab meat and muscle from conger eel.

Reputedly Santiago is also a place to try the best ice-cream in Chile. So of course we to go and try. We visited the place Emporio la Rosa that offers sorbert and ice-cream of various tastes. Very remarkable are flower or raspberry with mint or lemon with basil. If you still do not feel full enough, walk over the corner and look for Hogs. They sell hotdogs that are itself not so interesting but you can choose what to put in and then they simply become and extraordinary kishaw. Oh and their meat is 100% meat. And if you like to drink a shot try Pisco Sour. This drink is a real bomb full of alcohol.

Attractions in Santiago de Chile

We took a Free Tour in Santiago and found out there is a law saing it is forbidden to hang and fly the national flag on days that government approves. The reason is that they do not like people using flags during demonstrations.

And the best curiosity was Neruda. Well for the English speaking world it is probably some unknown person. But Neruda is a Czech writer so we were surprised about it. Neruda does not sounds Spanish. They explained us that Pablo Neruda was Chilean poet who changed his surname because he got inspired by Czech writer Jan Neruda. The world is really a small place. 😉