🇨🇱 Chile · Central Chile and Santiago
Barely an hour from the roar of Santiago, the Cajón del Maipo is the closest doorway to the high Andes and the favorite natural refuge of the capital's residents. The Maipo river, emerald green, carved this long canyon that climbs from the foothills to more than 2,500 meters, past mountain hamlets, forests, hanging glaciers and the imposing San José volcano keeping watch on the horizon.
This is a destination where nature calls the shots. People come to trek among snow-capped peaks, to soak in natural hot springs that bubble out of the mountain, to raft the Maipo, to ride horses along Andean trails and, above all, to gaze at the famous El Yeso reservoir, a dam of impossibly turquoise water ringed by arid summits that has become one of the most photographed images in central Chile.
This guide covers the Cajón del Maipo with a practical eye: how to get there from Santiago, what to see along each stretch of the valley, where to find the hot springs, how to organize a visit to the El Yeso reservoir and El Morado Natural Monument, what adventure activities are on offer and where to sleep and eat. An ideal plan for anyone wanting to pair the city with a proper lungful of mountain air.
The Cajón del Maipo owes its name to the Maipo river, whose course carved this canyon ('cajón' in Chilean mountain speech) into the Andes. The area was inhabited in pre-Hispanic times by Andean peoples and served as a route for muleteers heading to Argentina. The great push came in the 19th century with mining: deposits in the area were already being surveyed in 1791, and the discovery of silver and other metals drew settlement. The village of San José de Maipo was officially founded in 1792 by order of governor Ambrosio O'Higgins, precisely to administer the area's mining, which makes it one of the oldest Andean settlements in the region. At the start of the 20th century, between 1906 and 1914, the military railway of the Cajón del Maipo (the 'Ferrocarril del Volcán') was built, linking San Bernardo with El Volcán and serving both mineral transport and fledgling tourism until it closed in the 1980s; its old route can still be traced in the valley. The construction of the El Yeso reservoir, inaugurated in 1964 on the river of the same name, supplied drinking water to much of Santiago and left behind the turquoise lake that is now the Cajón's great attraction. Over the years, its closeness to the capital and the beauty of its landscapes turned the valley into the main mountain tourism destination in the Metropolitan Region. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political and economic heart of Chile: Santiago, founded in 1541 at the foot of the Andes, with the La Moneda palace and the canalised Mapocho River; pottery villages such as Pomaire; the mountain country of the Cajón del Maipo; and the world-class ski resorts of the Tres Valles.
Read the history of Santiago Metropolitan Region →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name Cajón del Maipo is, to a large extent, a geographical description. In Chilean mountain speech, a 'cajón' is a narrow, deep valley hemmed in by steep slopes with a river running through it: literally, a natural box carved into the range. The Cajón del Maipo is exactly that: the long canyon the Maipo river cut over millennia as it dropped from the high Andes toward the central valley, in what is today the southeast of the Santiago Metropolitan Region.
The second component, 'Maipo', comes from the river that gives the valley its identity. The name is linked to roots in the Indigenous languages of central Chile; there are different readings of its exact meaning, tied to the world of the peoples who lived in these Andean valleys before the Spanish arrived. The Maipo river, fed by meltwater from glaciers and snowfields on summits above 5,000 meters (such as the Maipo volcano or Cerro Marmolejo), is one of the main watercourses of central Chile and supplies much of the Santiago basin.
So 'Cajón del Maipo' joins the shape of the land —the Andean canyon— with the river that shaped it and gave it life. It is a name any resident of Santiago recognizes at once as shorthand for mountains, nature and a short escape.
Long before any village was founded and before the Spanish arrived, the Andean valleys of the Maipo basin were traveled and inhabited by the Indigenous peoples of central Chile. The area formed part of the territory of communities of hunters, gatherers and farmers who, in time, came under the influence of the Inca Empire as it extended its reach southward, folding this region into its networks of roads and exchange.
The mountains were never an impassable barrier, but a territory of passage. The high trails of the Cajón connected the Chilean side with the valleys on the far side of the Andes, and people, animals and goods moved along them. That tradition of crossing the range lasted for centuries: in colonial and republican times, muleteers worked the Cajón del Maipo driving livestock and hauling goods over the mountain passes into Argentina, an activity that left a deep mark on local culture.
That mountain inheritance —knowledge of the trails, handling livestock in the high Andes, the spare life of the muleteer— is still present in the imagination of the Cajón and in some of today's tourist activities, such as horseback rides guided by baqueanos who know every ravine in the valley.
The great push toward permanent settlement of the Cajón del Maipo came from mining. Toward the end of the 18th century, the discovery and working of deposits in the area —silver and other minerals in the mountain hills— drew people and economic activity to this corner of the range, until then thinly populated.
To administer and bring order to that mining activity and the growing settlement, the governor of the Kingdom of Chile, Ambrosio O'Higgins (father of Bernardo O'Higgins, hero of Chilean independence), ordered a town founded in the valley. Thus, in 1792, was born the town of San José de Maipo, which became the administrative and population center of the Cajón and one of the oldest Andean settlements in today's Metropolitan Region. Its layout, its square and its church bear witness to that colonial root.
Through the 19th century and into the early 20th, mining remained an engine of the valley, alongside muleteering and the extraction of resources such as lime and gypsum (which give their name to several sectors and to the Yeso river itself). San José de Maipo thus consolidated its role as the capital of the Cajón, a role it retains today as the seat of the commune of the same name.
At the start of the 20th century, the Cajón del Maipo lived a singular chapter of its history with the building of a railway that ran the length of the valley. Known as the Military Railway of the Cajón del Maipo —or, popularly, 'the Volcano Train'— it was built between 1906 and 1914 and connected the San Bernardo and Puente Alto area, on the fringes of Santiago, with the valley's villages as far as El Volcán, in the upper Cajón.
The railway was conceived for mining and freight —above all for hauling minerals, lime and gypsum out of the mountains— but it soon also played a key role in carrying passengers and in the fledgling tourist trade. For decades the train was what brought Santiago's residents to the mountains and gave life and connection to the valley's villages, becoming part of the Cajón's identity.
As road transport advanced and the economy shifted, the railway lost importance until it closed for good in the 1980s (around 1985). Today the old route, some bridges and the remains of stations can still be traced along the valley, and the 'Volcano Train' lives on as a fond memory in the history of the Cajón del Maipo.
One of the modern milestones of the Cajón del Maipo is the construction of the El Yeso reservoir, a great feat of engineering raised on the Yeso river, a tributary of the Maipo, in a high-mountain valley more than 2,500 meters up. Inaugurated in 1964, the reservoir was conceived to regulate and store water for supplying the city of Santiago, which was growing fast and needed to secure its supply.
Since then, El Yeso has played a strategic role in the Chilean capital's drinking water system: it stores meltwater from the Andes and releases it in a controlled way through the year. That is why the area is protected and access, tied to water catchment, demands care and respect from visitors.
Beyond its practical function, the reservoir left an unexpected legacy: one of the most famous landscapes in central Chile, an artificial lake of intense turquoise water, produced by suspended glacial sediment and ringed by arid mountains and snowy peaks. Over the years, that image became one of the most sought-after postcards for tourists and photographers, and turned the El Yeso reservoir into the star attraction of the upper Cajón del Maipo.
As the 20th century wore on and, above all, in recent decades, the Cajón del Maipo underwent a profound transformation: from a mining and ranching valley it became the main nature tourism destination in the Metropolitan Region. Its great advantage is proximity: a little over an hour from downtown Santiago, the visitor goes from cityscape to high Andes, with rivers, glaciers, hot springs and snowy peaks.
This tourism boom drove the development of services all along the valley: lodges, cabins, campsites, country restaurants and adventure operators offering rafting on the Maipo, horseback riding, trekking, canopy zip-lining and climbing. Areas such as the Cascada de las Ánimas Nature Sanctuary, privately managed along conservation lines, and El Morado Natural Monument, run by the national forestry corporation (Conaf), combine protecting the environment with receiving visitors.
Today the Cajón del Maipo faces the challenge of balancing that tourism development with the conservation of a fragile mountain ecosystem and with its key role in supplying Santiago's water. For the traveler, it remains the Chilean capital's natural escape par excellence: an Andean canyon where, in a matter of hours, the noise of the city gives way to the silence of the Andes.