Laguna Verde

Laguna Verde is maybe fifteen kilometers south of Valparaiso as the gull flies, but it feels like a different decade. We drove down a coastal road that gets rougher the further you go, past scrubby hills and the occasional grazing horse, until the bay opens up and you understand the name immediately. The water really is a jade green, something to do with the minerals or the algae or the way the light hits the shelter of the cove, and it sits there almost unnaturally still compared to the open Pacific just around the point.

It’s a working fishing village first and a destination second, which I mean as a compliment. There’s no boardwalk, no row of matching restaurants angling for your business. Just a cluster of houses, a handful of small boats bobbing at anchor, and men mending nets on the rocks in the late morning the way they probably have for generations. We bought a kilo of fresh congrio directly off a boat for less than a mediocre lunch would’ve cost us in Valparaiso, and grilled it that night over a fire we weren’t entirely sure we were allowed to build.

There’s also, oddly, an air force base nearby with a small aviation museum, which threw me the first time I saw a military jet parked near what is otherwise the quietest possible stretch of coastline. Lia found it funny that Chile put a fighter jet display next to a place this sleepy. We didn’t go in, honestly, we were more interested in the tide pools scattered along the rocks, thick with anemones and the occasional stranded crab that Lia insisted on rescuing back into a pool.

What I keep coming back to is the quiet. No cruise ship crowds bleeding down from Valparaiso, no influencer setups on the rocks, just the sound of water in the cove and someone’s radio playing cumbia faintly from a house up the hill. It’s the kind of place that reminds you the region isn’t only murals and funiculars.

When to go: Visit on a clear weekday, ideally in late spring or early autumn, when the water is calmest and you’ll likely have long stretches of the shore to yourself.