What a visitor's money does in Chile: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.
Chilean Peso (CLP) · 1 EUR = 1,103 CLP · 1 USD = 950 CLP
Exchange in Puerto Natales or Punta Arenas, not at the park — there is nowhere to change money inside it. Rates at the Argentine border crossings are poor. Card acceptance is good in town and non-existent on the trails.
Avoid: the park entrances — there are no machines inside the park at all
Use: Banco Estado, Santander, ServiEstado (all in Puerto Natales)
Puerto Natales is the last cash before the park, and its machines empty at weekends in high season. Draw on a weekday and take more than you think you need.
A short ride in Torres del Paine: $3,000–7,000 CLP across town — cheap
Cheaper than the metered taxis, and the regulated framework finally arrived in 2023.
Seafood, from the longest coastline anywhere: congrio, machas, erizos if you are brave. The Mercado Central is the tourist version and the Terminal Pesquero is the real one. Pastel de choclo in summer, and a pisco sour that Chile will tell you it invented, whatever Peru says.
Puerto Natales eats well for a town this remote — king crab, Patagonian lamb slow-roasted over a fire, and calafate berry everything. Inside the park you carry your own or pay refugio prices.
A small village with more restaurants than it needs and prices to match. The good ones do Andean rather than international: quinoa, llama, rica-rica in the pisco sour. Buy water in Calama, where it is a third of the price.
Fish, and it is superb — tuna, mahi-mahi and kana kana, often served ceviche-style. Umu, food cooked in an earth oven, is the traditional meal and worth arranging once. Everything else on the menu came off a plane, and the bill will show it.
The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.
Torres del PaineChileGranite towers, wind, and the emptiest sky in Patagonia
Easter IslandChileThe most remote inhabited island on earth, and nine hundred statues facing inland
Atacama DesertChileThe driest place on earth, at 2,400 metres, under the clearest sky anybody has measured
SantiagoChileA city with the Andes at the end of the street, and vineyards forty minutes the other way