Chile Culture & Language

Rodeo, not football, is Chile's official national sport — declared so in 1962. Chilean rodeo bears little resemblance to the American kind: two riders in traditional huaso dress work as a pair to pin a steer against a padded crescent wall. The season runs September to April and the finals in Rancagua are a genuine national event. Football is, of course, what people actually watch.

The national day, 18 September — el dieciocho — is the year's centre. The country stops for several days of fondas: barbecue, cueca dancing, empanadas and the terremoto, a drink of sweet wine and pineapple ice cream that earns its name.

Food is less spiced than elsewhere in Latin America and built on excellent raw materials. Pastel de choclo (a sweetcorn-topped beef pie), empanada de pino, completos (a hot dog buried under avocado and mayonnaise), curanto cooked in a pit in Chiloé, and the seafood, which is among the best anywhere — try congrio, machas and erizos. Mote con huesillo, a summer drink of wheat and dried peach, is sold on every street in January.

Wine matters here in a way worth knowing about. Chilean vines grow on their own roots because the country's natural barriers — desert, mountains, ocean, ice — kept phylloxera out. And Carménère, a French red grape believed extinct after the phylloxera epidemic, turned out in 1994 to have been growing in Chile all along, misidentified as Merlot.

Chile is more culturally homogeneous than its neighbours and its indigenous presence is real: the Mapuche are around a tenth of the population, with Aymara communities in the north and the Rapa Nui in the Pacific.

Spanish is the official language, and Chilean Spanish has a reputation, among Spanish speakers, for being the hardest variety to follow. It is spoken fast, drops final consonants, and carries a great deal of local slang. This is not a failure of your Spanish.

Two habits explain most of it. Po is tacked onto the end of sentences for emphasis — sí po, no po. And Chileans use a distinctive second-person form: ¿cachai? ("get it?"), ¿vai? ("are you going?"), where standard Spanish would say ¿entiendes? and ¿vas?.

Worth having: bacán (great), la raja (excellent — informal), fome (boring), al tiro (right away, used constantly), luca (a thousand pesos), once (the late-afternoon tea-and-bread meal, which most Chileans eat instead of dinner).

Weón is everywhere in speech, means anything from "mate" to a serious insult depending entirely on tone, and is best understood rather than used.

English is common in Santiago, in tourism and among younger people, and much less so elsewhere. In the south, Mapudungun is spoken by Mapuche communities, and Rapa Nui is co-official on Easter Island.