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| Street art, Valparaiso |
February 8th - Sometimes you hear about a place and the appeal is obvious. Spectacular scenery, unique food, roller coasters - whatever tickles your fancy. Other times it's a little harder to put your finger on. Valparaiso is a port town on Chile's Pacific coast, a little less than two hours north-west of Santiago. It now encompasses several other coastal towns and villages to make up the second largest metropolitan area in Chile, with around a million inhabitants. The centre of Valparaiso is known for its down and dirty charm, whether you want to describe it as Bohemian, esoteric, or just plain interesting. The city is built on a higgledy-piggledy mish-mash of hills, connected by some improbably steep streets, and a multitude of "ascensors" or funiculars, dating back over a hundred years and now enjoying UNESCO world heritage site status. This is one of those places that can't be described by the sum of its parts. It is the melding of its people, (students, artists, travellers, humans), its music, its street art, its topography, its colourful buildings, its port city grunginess, that make it at once indescribable and beguiling.
We made our way down the coastal road from our apartment in Concon, an old fishing village that is now a jungle of soaring condo towers. Almost every inch of the coast, except for the occasional, but impressively large, sand dune, is covered in apartments, paying no heed to steep cliffs and rocky shoreline. The cliffs give way to a flatter plain as you come to Vina del Mar, and as a result this town feels calmer, more orderly, and more liveable. This is accentuated by the broad seafront promenade that extends for several kilometres. One of my school friends, let's call him "Chris", spent an exchange year here during university so we swung by his apartment and visited the beach out front to reminisce on his behalf.
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The seafront of Renaca
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| Trying to scare the Pacific, Vina del Mar |
After Vina del Mar, a sprawling six-lane highway links to Valparaiso and an altogether different feel once again. We parked the car and headed straight to Jota Cruz restaurant, another of Chris' recommendations, for a Chilean staple, Chorrillanas. This would seem to be a distant cousin of that Candian favourite, the Poutine. Chorrillanas is pile of fries, topped with fried onions, cheese and chopped, seasoned steak. It's delicious. The restaurant itself is an Aladdin's cave of curios including the kind of 19th century landscape paintings you would find in an English living room and a full deep sea diver's suit.
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| Teasing Chris with a livestream of Chorrillanas feast |
Refuelled, we spent a bit of time in the adjacent Parque Italia amidst the teenage skaters, kids' bouncy castles, food stalls and defaced statues, a legacy perhaps of the political demonstrations that have been recurrent in this region. Onwards in search of an ascensor. We passed a cathedral and stopped in on a women's feminist craft market, where we bought Felicity a necklace for her upcoming birthday (don't tell her, it's a secret!).
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Parque Italia bouncy fun
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| These things, all over the world |
The first acsensor we tried was closed. Of the dozens in the city, they are variously closed permanently, closed temporarily for maintenance, or operational. So we headed to the next, Reina Victoria. Google maps either let us down or did us a "solid" whichever way you look at it. Serendipitously, we ended up winding our way up through the streets, marvelling at the eclectic housing and extraordinary street art. We came out at the top of the ascensor somehow, enjoyed the slightly scary steel slide, and then hopped on board and descended back down (for the princely sum of 100 pesos each, around 15 cents).
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Paintings on buildings, steep streets
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Ditto, plus some Fergusons
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View from the top of the Cerro Alegre
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| Ascensor Reina Victoria |
Switching centuries, we ordered an Uber to take us back to the parking lot. Waiting for the car to come gave us a final opportunity to soak up the atmosphere, surrounded as we were by more murals, the music coming from bars either side of us, and the beautiful people of Valparaiso.
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| We stopped on the way back at the entrance to Concon to check out this little protected outcrop and saw a squadron/pod/pouch/scoop of pelicans (yes, those are all commonly used collective nouns for pelicans!) |
We'd like to head north along the coast in the coming days to see if we can find some less developed areas. Our own condo is tired, somewhat rundown and grotty. We can see the ocean from our balcony but it is obscured by a parking lot, and the faded, peeling paint of the block in front of us. I saw graffiti over a sign along the hazardous waterfront path that said something along the lines of: "Walkers of Renaca [small village next to Concon]: Here we can observe the aberration of unbridled capitalism. Predatory real estate of the sanctuary of nature of the dunes of Concon..." (did you know Google translate can work from handwriting? Aren't the innovative forces of capitalism amazing! 😜).
Ok, we're off to the beach now to rest the synapses... Hasta luego.
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