Chile - Valparaiso

 After a bit of a nightmare travel day (Taxi going missing, Airport issues, Missing transport, etc) we made it to our little boutique hotel in the old part of Valparaiso.  First impression was seriously steep hills!  You do not want to drop anything that rolls cause it would roll for a LONG time… 

After a good night’s sleep we set off to explore the city with a guide.  Valparaiso’s historic quarter is a UNESCO site, which is around 4 out 41 of hills (Cerros), that are protected. There are a few things that make the historic hills unique.  The first is the style of building.  Its buildings have kept their unique character from the early days. Most of the buildings are timber frame construction, which they filled with a clay/hay mixture and then covered in corrugated metal sheets.  Due to the UNESCO status, all the buildings are required to keep their style.  

What was also interesting is the historical meld of immigrants.  There are German, English, French, Italian, Yugoslavian, etc quarters of the old town.  You can see this in the street names, or for example the fire stations.  We saw the 11th British fire station, followed by the 8th French one.  

Valparaiso is one of the oldest cities in Chile, settled in 1544, and is even older than Santiago. The second thing that makes Valparaiso unique, is all the street art.  People pay the local artists to paint murals on their homes and businesses.  Some of them are amazing!  And they are EVERYWHERE.  Luckily with our tour guide we got to see some of the more iconic ones.  

As the city is so hilly, we found that the funiculars are very handy, and a leg saver.  This city has the most funiculars that we have ever encountered in one city.  Most of them have been modernised with electronic system, but there is still one that is purely mechanical, and needs an operator to start, slow and stop the car in the right position.  

Apart from exploring the historical market, we also walked about the city to get a better feel for the city vibe.  We came across streets filled with vendors selling everything from curios, fruits and vegetables to toilet paper, cleaning products, clothes and other household products.  It had a great hustle and bustle vibe!

Part of our exploration was going to local fish market, where the fishermen were still emptying their boats and selling their catch right next to their boats.  There was also a whole section of stalls dedicated to cleaning fish that people just bought.  All the off-cuts were then fed to both the seagulls (and there were thousands!) and the sea lions. 

We all loved the sea lions.  They were amazing!  Some just siting on the rocks but there was a whole pod of them by the pier where they get fed.  And as soon as the food dropped, it became a feeding frenzy!  It was interesting to watch. The one disappointment was lunch.  We thought that, as we were by the fish market, that the local seafood restaurants would be amazing.  We picked a 4.0 rated restaurant and asked for their recommendations, and what came out was nothing special or even flavoursome unfortunately.

Valparaiso also has a National History museum, and it reminded us of our old Pitt River’s Museum in Oxford but just on a lot smaller scale.  It really focused on the local nature in Chile and its stretch of the Pacific Ocean.  This meant that they had some very interesting specimens that we have never seen before. But unfortunately everything was in Spanish, and apart from looking at it, we did not learn much more about the interesting specimens.

Next Stop is Atacama.  Going from sea level to around 2500m in one hop!