6. Chile - Vibrant Valparaiso

Covering 05 Feb - 10 Feb 2019

Valparaiso from some of the many viewpoints

Bonnie, Heather, Newt on
a flight of steps with
only the risers painted

Well, what a place ! The whole area around us is brightly coloured with street art everywhere and I don’t mean scrawls by semi-literate vandals. A lot of the wall murals can only be called primitive or naïve (think Grandma Moses) but there is a lot of really clever and witty artwork about. Rough plaster adds a good degree of texture to skin drawings and I have never seen so much artwork outside before. Flights of steps often have paintings on only the risers so the finished article can only be seen properly from a particular angle as you approach. Many buildings here are clad in corrugated iron with a smaller profile than we’re used to and these sheets are often multi-coloured. It is just fabulous. It appears that there’s a sort of unofficial truce in that walls with clearly talented artwork on is rarely defaced by the spray can brigade. If the truce holds of course it becomes an encouragement to get a decent bit of artwork up on your walls.

We’d arrived after another long coach journey, although my view on what constitutes long has changed. It seems to me now that anything up to four hours or so is just a trip to the shops. Heather’s view is that the coaches generally run to time while I think the schedule is really just promising ‘same day delivery’. They are comfortable though and give me time to catch up on podcasts and sleeping.

Heather's inner child escapes !

street artist at work

famous jazz musicians

Ascensor El Peral

Valparaiso is a large sprawling port city and quite naturally it sits on the coast with accompanying lovely cooling sea breezes. This knocks 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (5 – 11 C) off Santiago temperatures and makes it a much more comfortable city to walk around. Just as well really because it’s very hilly and as I write this in late afternoon, the temperature is in the low 70s F but is 85 F in Santiago. At any of the many viewpoints here it’s possible to look across and see the docks in front and by looking to the side you can see the whole place slanting upwards from the relatively narrow flat coastal strip. The interesting area which is where we are is called Cerro Allegre and dips up and down like a rumpled blanket after a particularly disturbed night’s sleep. There are flights of steps, steep streets which twist and turn and the whole effect is like an Escher drawing brought to reality. There are a dozen or so funiculars, called Ascensors here, dotted in various places which make the ascents less tiresome, so for 100 Pesos (15 US cents/12p) you can gain two or three hundred vertical feet very easily with half a dozen strangers for company.

Ascensor Reine de Victoria

Our hotel sits on a corner and in keeping with the topography of the city has two roads and a pedestrian walkway leading down to it and one road running downwards away from it. There are a dozen or more restaurants within a hundred yards. The hotel is a large old house which only runs as a hotel part of the year. For the rest of the time the fourteen rooms in the house are let to students so it must be a bit of a goldmine but I hope the other rooms are set up better than ours was for students. The room was large with a very high ceiling more than twelve feet high but just had an ordinary chair and a high table which was at about mid-chest level when I sat at it. The whole place was very Valparaisoesque (now that is a word), worn and with odd touches, plastic bottles filled with coloured plastic bags forming a screen, a collection of toys, random paintings, dying plants, bits and pieces. Charming and wacky or just a mess ? Let me know what you think !

Reception at our hotel - wacky or artistic ?

Third Reich/Soviet/Odeon movement

We believe that a number of buildings here were destroyed in the earthquake about ten years ago although distinguishing between what is earthquake damage and just sheer neglect is difficult to ascertain. There are buildings clinging to hillsides that look as if a stiff breeze would bring them down but this is clearly not true, they just hang on. There are a scattering of Art Deco and mock period houses, some very modern designs and down by the docks a justice building in the style I call the Third Reich/Soviet/Odeon movement.

Lukas museum gatepost

There’s a museum set up for a famous, at least in Chile, cartoonist which we visited. A lovely house with open views of the bay but disappointingly very little original artwork and no concession to non-Spanish speakers. Good little drawings with echoes of TinTin amongst others but the shine taken off a bit when we found out that he had produced some cartoons which favoured the Pinochet regime. For those of you who don’t know, Pinochet led the military coup in the early 1970s overthrowing the democratically elected Allende. Not far from the hotel where we had stayed in Santiago was the house where over seventy Pinochet opponents, most in their twenties were tortured to death by the regime. Plaques on the pavement outside list their names and ages. Thousands of others ‘disappeared’ while Pinochet was in power and to our shame the UK with Margaret Thatcher in power refused to extradite Pinochet back to face charges once he had been overthrown.

the docks as seen from all over the city

calmly getting an earful of paint

The city also still has a few instances of that short-lived business, the Internet Café, which were quite common before the proliferation of connections available today. They probably have the same sort of slow and ancient machines that I remember from places like India where there was always the danger of keyboards so tacky that your fingers would stick to them. Who else remembers that !