Olmue

Olmue sits in this fertile little valley below the La Campana range, and it does a strange, likeable double duty as both a trailhead town and a place people go specifically to do nothing. We came for the hiking, mainly, because La Campana is one of the better day hikes near Valparaiso, the same mountain Darwin climbed and wrote about in his diaries, all those Chilean palms lower down giving way to bare rock and, on a clear day, a view that stretches to the Andes on one side and the Pacific on the other. It’s a serious climb though, six or seven hours round trip depending on the route, and I underestimated it badly the first time.

We started too late in the morning, ran low on water by the third hour, and Lia had to talk me out of turning back about two-thirds up. The summit views were worth every complaint I made on the way, snow-capped Andean peaks on one horizon, the ocean haze on the other, and the palma chilena groves rustling below like something out of a different climate entirely. Coming down my knees were done, completely done, and that’s when Olmue’s other identity became useful.

The town itself has a handful of spa hotels built around natural hot springs, low-key places, not resort-glamorous, more the kind of spot where retired Chilean couples come for a week of thermal baths and quiet dinners. We collapsed into one for two nights, and I have rarely appreciated a thermal pool as much as I did sliding into that water with legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. There’s also a genuinely good local food scene built around the valley’s produce, we had a lunch of cazuela and fresh empanadas at a family place that felt like eating in someone’s actual dining room.

Olmue doesn’t try to be a destination in itself the way Valparaiso does. It’s a place you pass through on the way to something bigger, or a place you retreat to after doing something hard, and honestly both versions of that trip felt complete.

When to go: Hike La Campana between September and April, avoiding the summer’s harshest midday heat by starting early; the springs are pleasant year-round, especially in the cooler winter months.