San José de Maipo

This guide to San Jose de Maipo traces the Andean valley town back to 1792, when colonial governor Ambrosio O'Higgins founded it to oversee the silver miners already working the mountains behind it. You'll hear about the arrieros who drove mule trains up the cordillera, and how by the 1840s copper veins higher up the valley grew into El Volcan, a mining camp that by 1925 had become a small city with its own cinema. It follows the aerial cableways and narrow-gauge railway that carried the ore down, and the empty railbed you can still walk today.