BACK TO CHILE - VALPARAISO, CASABLANCA VALLEY, AND PACIFIC COAST
After spending the night in Calama, near San Pedro de Atacama, we flew to Santiago the next day to spend our last four days in Valparaiso, a short drive from Santiago airport. We passed Casablanca Valley with its beautiful wineries on the way. Vina Mar was the one we enjoyed the most, it is famous for its sparkling wines and was the first winery to produce them in the Casablanca Valley.
We arrived at our Valparaiso B&B pretty late, just in time for one of the best views of this Unesco-protected city from our room window.
Valparaiso is very different from clean and boring Santiago and is a port town with a mix of unique, sophisticated, colorful, boring, and ugly wall paintings, hills and funiculars, great street music, amazing seafood, loved by poets and eccentrics like Pablo Neruda.
“Valparaíso, what an absurdity you are, how crazy: a crazy port.
What a head of disheveled hills, that you never finished combing.
Never did you have time to dress yourself, and always you were surprised by life.”
– Pablo Neruda
We visited Neruda’s famous and very eccentric house/museum, La Sebastiana, perched on one of the highest hills of Valparaiso. The museum gives a very interesting insight into the poet’s world and offers some of the best views of the city.
“I built the house,
I made it first in the air.
Then I raised the flag into the air
And I left it hanging
From the firmament, from the star, from
The clarity and the darkness.”
“A la Sebastiana”, Pablo Neruda
On Chile’s September 11, 1973, the day of the coup, the house was attacked and flooded. Neruda himself was most likely given a lethal injection at the hospital and passed away hours afterward.
He is renowned for writing poignant, exquisite poetry and is recognized as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
Walking the hills, riding funiculars, and discovering street art everywhere in this dirty and very eccentric, and rather unique city had been a never-ending pleasure during our stay. We found the clean and beautiful nearby Vina del Mar truly boring but never got tired of Valparaiso.
We also made a very inspiring day trip to the Dunes of Con-Con to see the beautiful Pacific coast which very much reminded us of Oregon and California.
