Santiago was already on summer vacation when we arrived in the second week of January and we were told that the city was moving at a slower pace. In particular we were warned that in February "everybody" leaves and that the city is practically empty. I was prepared for a grand exodus, but although there may have been a couple of shops closed here and there, it didn't really seem like a ghost town around here.
The last couple of weeks, however, have proved that we were naive about this city. Now that "everybody" has come back, it's something like a madhouse around here. From the bird's eye view of the city on my morning hikes up San Cristobal I've watched the cheerful bustle on the streets below congeal into a frozen honking gridlock.
Meanwhile, the sidewalks and pathways might be slightly more crowded, but not noticeably. The number of couples making out in the park has increased only marginally. The subway also doesn't seem to be that much more crowded than before (although even in the summer I avoided riding it at rush hour, so maybe I'm not the best person to analyze this particular piece of data). At any rate, from my purely anecdotal observation I've concluded that it's mostly the car drivers that leave the city in the summer. Thankfully their return has had very minimal impact on our ability to move around the city--except that one particular street we habitually jaywalked now requires proceeding to the actual crosswalk.
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