Renaca

Renaca is the beach Chileans actually go to, which is different from the beach tourists are told to go to. It’s a strip of high-rise apartment towers a few minutes north of Vina del Mar, and in January and February the whole thing fills up with santiaguinos escaping the capital’s heat, which, fair enough, I do the same thing every summer now. The sand is genuinely wide and clean, one of the better urban beaches on this stretch of coast, but the water is the cold Humboldt Current kind of cold, the kind that makes you gasp and immediately regret your decisions.

What struck me on my first visit was how vertical everything is. You’ve got this long flat beach and then, right behind it, a wall of apartment towers that blocks most of the hillside view you’d get elsewhere in the region. It’s not pretty in the way Valparaiso’s hills are pretty. It’s more like a slightly faded version of a Spanish costa resort, which honestly has its own appeal if you’re not trying to photograph anything, just trying to lie down and not think.

We came for a long weekend with friends from Santiago and ate more completos and mariscal than I’d like to admit, at plastic-chair places along the seafront where the ceviche is served in styrofoam cups and is somehow better than most sit-down restaurants manage. There’s a rock formation just offshore, Las Piedras Feas, that everyone calls the ugly rocks, and I found myself weirdly charmed that a whole coastline landmark got named for being unattractive. Chileans don’t oversell things, which I appreciate.

By evening the crowd thins and the light does something nice, gold across the sand, surfers still out catching the last decent sets before dark. It’s not a place I’d come for solitude or for architecture. It’s a place I come to do exactly what everyone else is doing, which after enough years of chasing hidden corners of Chile felt like its own kind of relief.

When to go: Peak season is January and February when the beach is genuinely lively, but if you want the sand without the crowds, aim for late November or March.