Brilliant, helped by the fact that we arrived to a warm, summertime city. Santiago is obviously huge, but seems logically laid out with many, many parks, fountains, statues, green areas to shade, sit and chill for a while and tree lined roads. It has plazas large and centrally proud as well as small courtyards tucked away down side streets with restaurants and coffee shops sprawling out onto the terraced areas for the city dwellers to sip coffees and eat their ice creams.
Many of the old buildings are now used by small businesses as offices, but the structure of the old build has been held intact, thus Santiago keeps the feel of an old city. Churches and civic buildings are huge and reflect the spanish influence very heavily; looking at the main post office square you could be standing in Madrid's Plaza Ana.
