Bellavista

This guide to Bellavista in Santiago opens before dawn on December 8th, with pilgrims climbing San Cristobal on foot toward the fourteen-meter iron Virgin unveiled here in 1908, an act of penance older than the neighborhood's own bars and murals. A few streets over, it turns to the quieter devotion of Pablo Neruda's La Chascona, the house he built and hid for a love he could not yet make public. Listen for how one hillside holds both a saint's feast day and a poet's relics.