New Continents - Part 4

 

On our last day in Santiago we explored the city, one stop I particularly enjoyed was the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, housed in an 1805 building it featured exhibits of indigenous art and craft from pre-Columbian times, i.e. before America was "discovered" by Christopher Columbus. I knew very little about the native groups in South America prior to European colonisation, about the only culture I'd ever read about or seen on TV was the Aztecs but they only occupied the North of the continent with just a small foothold in what is now Chile. There were many and varies cultures that evolved on the continent and this museum attempted to cover most of them, in some detail, many stories and artefacts from ancient times were presented and the whole experience left me feeling like I knew practically zero about the history of the place, it was an eye-opener!

Some example pre-Columbian artefacts, they somehow reminded me of Japanese Samurai figures.

Modern Chilean art was mainly on display on the sides of the buildings in the form of street art and much like Valparaiso there were some splendid exampled in Santiago, the picture below shows an example of this from the Bellavista district.

On our last evening in the city we had dinner at a restaurant a friend had recommended to me, called "Bocanariz" it's more or less a wine bar that serves food but more fine dining than steak and chips. The wine list was epic and exclusively Chilean wines (which was fine by me!) and the food was unusual and delicious, I snapped a picture of the starters for our table of four, those little Cornish Pasties in the middle are called Empanadas and you can find them all over South America, these were of particularly good quality.

I had a rather unusual dish, essentially a Conger Eel and Clam stew, the eel tasted much like a firm cod fillet but the overall taste was very much like a more spicy version of fish soup, v. tasty! (see below)

Food gods satisfied we headed back to our hotel for an early start the next day, we were off to wine country and back over the mountains to Argentina!