Cerro Manquehue - the place of the condors

From the apartment where we currently live one can see an impressive little hill - Cerro Manquehue. It is dome shaped but with a flat top and towers above all the high rise buildings around us. It is 1635m or so in elevation, or roughly a thousand metres higher than where we are. Wikipedia says it is an extinct volcano.
 

Cerro Manquehue from our apartment (it's the taller flat one of the two hills in view)

Yesterday we thought it might be nice to get out of the city today and go for a little walk. This being the closest hill it was our obvious choice. Andeshandbook.org describes about a hand-full of different routes, we picked the (probably?) most popular one which provides access by car through the more exclusive hillside parts of Vitacura - one of the nicest, greenest, quietest, least smoggiest and no doubt also one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in town with possibly the highest 4x4 density in the country (...Clifton eat your heart out!!!).

Except, we opted for the 2 hour pre-walk warm-up walk starting at the apartment. Rather than falaffeling about how delightful the walk and how splendid the views were how about a few pictures:

Cerro Manquehue apparently means "place of the condors" in the language of the Mapuche, the local indigenous people. Not many of them left here these days, though. We saw a couple of pretty big birds but I don't think they were condors.

Anyway, the day was a success, it's nice to know that within (literally!) walking distance there is place where the hustle and bustle of the city is no more than a distant background roar far below. And we are not even talking about the proper big 'hills' further east (those that can be seen in some of the pictures). Soon we'll try to explore some of them, too.