Curicó
"The plaza in Curicó is the kind of place that makes you wonder why more cities aren't this good at being cities."
Curicó announced itself via its plaza, which I reached from the bus terminal by walking eight blocks due east through a grid of clean streets where nothing much was happening but everything felt in order. The Plaza de Armas de Curicó is one of the finest in Chile — an assertion I make knowing it is the kind of claim that invites argument, but having seen enough Chilean plazas to form an opinion. It has a French cast-iron fountain at its center, brought from Paris in 1904, surrounded by enormous Canary Island palms that create a canopy dense enough to make the air under them feel ten degrees cooler. I arrived at eleven in the morning and sat on a bench for thirty minutes, ostensibly reading, actually watching people: elderly men walking very slowly in one direction, schoolchildren in white smocks running in the other, a man selling newspapers from a cart, two pigeons with apparent grudges.
The Curicó Valley sits below the Andes at an altitude that gives the growing season an extra week or two of cooling at night — a small meteorological advantage that translates, over a harvest, into wines with more aromatic lift than their Maipo counterparts. Miguel Torres established here in 1979 and is still the valley’s most famous name, though the operation has grown into something enormous and the original spirit survives mainly in their small-batch releases. More interesting to me was Viña San Pedro, whose Cabo de Hornos Cabernet I found in a restaurant in Curicó town center and which cost less than I expected for something that tasted like it had been thinking since 2018.
The town has the proportions of a place that serves a large agricultural hinterland without being dominated by it. There are three good hardware stores on the same block, which is always a reliable indicator of a working economy. The Mercado Municipal operates in a building from 1905 that survived the 2010 earthquake better than many of its neighbors, and inside it the fish stalls and meat counters and produce sellers conduct their transactions with the urgency of people who have somewhere to be. I bought two peaches from a woman who handed them to me with a lecture about how supermarkets were ruining stone fruit, and she was correct.
For lunch I went to the market’s comedor section, where fixed-price midday meals come in three courses and cost between twelve hundred and eighteen hundred pesos. The soup was a consommé with egg and noodles. The main was reineta fish with rice and a tomato salad dressed with lemon. Dessert was a leche asada, the Chilean baked custard that looks exactly like a flan and tastes like the memory of something your grandmother made. I ate everything and then had a cortado at the coffee kiosk near the entrance, watching the vendors pack up for their afternoon break with the synchronized ease of people who have done this ten thousand times.
The road south from Curicó toward the coast passes through the Lontué and Teno river valleys, cutting across a landscape that feels more intimate than the broader Colchagua and Maipo basins — narrower, more vertical, the vineyards interrupted by walnut orchards and cherry farms. I drove it on a rented motorcycle in October with no itinerary, stopping at a bodega where a man was pressing grapes using a press that looked homemade and probably was, and he filled a plastic bottle from the press for me and charged me a hundred pesos and shook his head when I tried to give him more.
When to go: October through December for cooler riding weather and new vine growth. March for harvest. The annual Fiesta de la Vendimia de Curicó, one of the region’s oldest harvest festivals, runs in late March and is considerably more local than its Colchagua equivalent — less theater, more chicha.