Beaches in Chile

Four thousand kilometres of Pacific coast and cold water along almost all of it — the Humboldt Current runs the entire length and keeps sea temperatures in the mid-teens even off the northern desert. Swimming is rare here; the coast is for looking at, for surfing in a wetsuit, and for working. The north is Atacama meeting sea, with white sand and turquoise water that photographs as tropical and is not, and with the driest desert on earth immediately behind it. The centre around Viña del Mar and Zapallar has the resorts, the nineteenth-century sea-bathing habit and the surf at Pichilemu. The south dissolves into fjords, islands and rain, where the shoreline stops being a beach coast at all. The cold water is also the reason for the wildlife: Humboldt penguins, sea lions and the anchovy fishery that feeds them. Easter Island, thirty-seven hundred kilometres offshore, administratively Chilean and culturally Polynesian, has the country's only genuinely sheltered warm-water sand beach, at Anakena, with moai standing behind it. Practically: the season is January and February, when the whole country holidays at once and the coast road fills; Easter Island is five hours by air from Santiago; and rip currents on the open coast are serious and poorly marked.