Chile: Valparaiso – the writing’s on the wall

From Pisco Elqui to Valparaiso – a town by the ocean west of Santiago, for the next couple nights. Valparaiso is cute in a rundown crumbling kind of way, with colourfully painted houses and flowers and hippie art everywhere on the streets it’s somewhere between Copenhagen’s Christiania and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashborough. There’s plenty of graffiti everywhere, some of it quite artistic and some less so. While the town feels quite nice and relaxed (…very relaxed, one church featured the graffitied slogan “La Ganja es una deidad”!) some areas are a bit dodgy – the guidebook mentions several times where you should and shouldn’t walk around at various hours of the day. One place you do need to go is to use one of the strange antique lifts installed all over town to go up and down the steep hills. These tilted elevators on rails are creaking like an old sail-ship and feel like they’re about to come loose at any second, but apparently they haven’t killed anyone so far.

The Paseo Atkinson esplanade in Valparaiso.

The Paseo Atkinson esplanade in Valparaiso.

Flowers in Valparaiso.

Flowers in Valparaiso.

Graffiti in Valparaiso.

Graffiti in Valparaiso.

Graffiti in Valparaiso.

Graffiti in Valparaiso.

2 Responses to “Chile: Valparaiso – the writing’s on the wall”

  1. […] across the Andes back to Santiago, then to Valparaiso, the cute rundown sea-port town me and Edel visited already once while making our way south in Chile three months ago. We were stressing a bit to make the […]

  2. Hi, David and Edel,

    My name is Lucrecia Orensanz. I’m a Mexican translator and I participate in CĂ­rculo de Traductores, a non-profit transator network. I really liked your pictures and used one of them (full credit) to illustrate a post in our blog: http://circulodetraductores.blogspot.mx/2013/11/convocatoria-2013-2014-del-proyecto.html
    I hope it’s ok with you. If it’s not, just let me know and I’ll take it down. Thanks a lot,

    Lucrecia