Pablo Neruda's world came to a brutal, sudden end. But the great poet's work—and his carnival spirit—survive and are everywhere in Chile. Gully Wells makes a pilgrimage

Pablo Neruda called it "my thin country." And you have only to cast the most careless glance at a map to see why. Squeezed between the world's longest mountain range and the world's biggest ocean, Chile looks like a snake with a serious, possibly life-threatening case of anorexia nervosa. Nobody in his right mind would actually design a country with this shape, but there it is, slithering elegantly down the western shore of South America, its backbone almost three thousand miles long, stretching from the Atacama Desert in the north to the wild desolation of Patagonia in the south, with Cape Horn forming its coccyx at the very tip. Chileans are obsessed with their country's bizarre extremities and assume, quite irrationally, that any visitor must be too.

Even before our plane had landed in Santiago, my temporary companion, a balding gentleman with sad eyes who was "in the wine business," asked me when—not if—I would be visiting "el norte" and "el sur." When I said that I had no plans to explore either region, he did a classic comic's double take and the depressed expression on his face was instantly replaced by one of total incredulity. I soon learned (since I was asked the exact same question by every single person I met) to break the news gently, with a long sigh and deep regret, blaming my tight schedule for an otherwise inexplicable itinerary. I could never have admitted that I had no special desire to be fried in a desert, ride a horse through the drizzle, go fishing in arctic waters, or hike across a national park, no matter how spectacular the scenery.

My opinion is that spectacular scenery belongs on gas station calendars, outside the windows of great hotels, or on the pages of magazines just like the one you are now reading. Say this out loud in Chile and not only will you offend your kind hosts but you will also be pegged an insensitive lunatic—hence my long, and deeply mendacious, sighs of regret.

The truth is that I am an urban creature and, with the help of some Chilean friends who know me all too well and a Scottish poet who knows me even better, had planned a trip that would take me to two cities, one booming, the other gently preserved in aspic, as well as a chic beach playground—Santiago, Valparaíso, and Zapallar—and, more significantly, to all three of Pablo Neruda's wonderfully eccentric houses, a trio of poetic works designed by Chile's most famous Surrealist architect, Germán Rodriguez Arias. And all within a couple of hours of one another. No deserts, no lakes, no wildlife, and the only fish I'd be looking at would be grilled and on a plate at Chiringuito, Mrs. Thatcher's favorite restaurant in Zapallar.

Santiago is not one of those cities that any fool could instantly fall in love with. Which isn't to say that it is without charm. There's something undeniably dramatic about seeing the snow-covered Andes soaring up at the end of an avenue or, even better, reflected in the mirrored glass facade of a towering office block. This juxtaposition of urban cool and jagged nature produces a definite frisson that is missing in, say, Paris, Florence, or New York. But unlike those cities, Santiago lacks any vestige of architectural coherence. Partly the fault of earthquakes, which have, over the centuries, destroyed most of the original Spanish colonial buildings, partly a consequence of a magpielike tendency to take on the style of other places, and partly due to the late-twentieth-century mania for tearing down the old and putting up the new, Santiago's style is, well . . . eclectic.