Yesterday I walked around Cerro Alegre, my neighborhood all afternoon, up and down the streets. I stayed on the hill and took something like 250 pictures. After a quick pizza, I was calling it an early night, and didn’t go out anymore.

I had the prefect night in my hotel, the bed being a huge size all for me to stretch out… And after a perfect breakfast with scrambled eggs, fresh fruit salad, cheese, advocate, dried fruit, a fresh fruit juice and coffee (I really can recommend Hotel Fauna!) I was ready for the steep hills of Valparaiso.

 

It was kind of covered and cloudy, so I put on two layers of long sleeve hoodies and started walking around Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, to take more pictures. The city hills are as steep, or even more than those in San Francisco, so that sometimes you cannot even build stairs.

Instead, Valparaíso has built some furniculars, called ascensores, old, wooden, rumbling cable cars that pull people up and down, maybe half a dozen at a time. The ride costs 300 Pesos, something like 50 cents.

I took ascensor Concepción downhill to the flat area close to the port, and walked over to Cerro Bellavista. This hill is known for its open air mural museum and one of the famous houses of Pablo Neruda, Chiles most famous poet and writer.

La Sebastiana, as Neruda’s house is called, is on top of that steep hill, and I walked all the way up, sweating and getting rid of my layers… to find it closed because they were out of water…  I later learned that today a major problem occurred with the water provision, which also explained why a lot of restaurants and places were closed during the day.

Well, ok, as I haven’t read anything by Neruda, I don’t really know if I missed something. I just went there because… well, it felt like the cultural thing to do.

I then followed the streets and stairs of the open air mural museum, a really nice walk and a great idea, if the other sprayers had respected the murals painted by other artists in the 1990s. I really like graffiti and stencils, and enjoy them. But it’s a pity when big art has been sprayed over or just damaged by some stupid sprayer… At least those walls could have been respected.

Down again I walked through the flat area, with its old 19th century buildings that remind you of Paris, Budapest or Buenos Aires. That part of the city is stretched out along the coast, but not wide, only a couple of blocks. Plaza Sotomayor is one of the main squares. The mountains don’t leave much space for this part of the city. From there, the dozen still running ascensores go up the various hills.

I can’t really say this city is beautiful. Its chaotic, a lot of the houses on the hills look like random, quick constructions, sometimes outright poor, dangerously close to a favela style. There’s a lot of trash sometimes in the streets (apparently the public workers have been on strike three weeks ago – that might explain this as being some leftovers…)

But it’s a fun city. The houses, as oddly as they might look, are colorful, bright blue, green yellow… Street art greets from ever other corner… it’s simply fun to walk through, without having any ‘must-see’ sights as such…

Valparaiso has been hit by several major earthquakes in its history, in 1906, killing 3000 people, and again in 2010, in one of the biggest earthquakes ever measured, moving the whole South American plate, in parts by several meters, and having an influence on the rotation of the Earth. You can still see some damaged structures and abandoned buildings, with fissures in the walls. But generally, Chile seems to have recovered well from this shock.

But I wonder how this city’s houses, build precariously on those high hills and looking all like wooden, lofty constructions, can withstand the next one. But maybe it’s exactly that lofty, wooden structure that keeps them stable when it hist, just bending and creaking, but not collapsing.

Tonight I’ll go out in one of the bars, tomorrow I’ll check out the neighboring city of Viña del Mar. I like it here, so I extended my stay by one day, and a friend from Santiago is coming out for a day at the beach.