Valparaíso: ‘Funky Chile’

February 11, 2019, Valparaíso, Chile — Day 1 of an overnight in this city of 1 million. Like numerous smaller Chilean ports we’ve visited, after its heyday in the late 1800’s Valparaíso’s fortunes plunged with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. But it’s still busy, and its historic buildings and culture earned it the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation in 2003.

Sited on 45 hills, it has been compared to San Francisco. It was founded in 1536 by Spaniard Juan de Saavedra and fully established in 1544 by Pedro de Valdivia. In its early days, it was a hotbed of piracy and smuggling, especially by the English and the Dutch. This ended when the city opened its port for international marine trade. One of its main export products was whale oil, used for lighting around the world.

As we’ve seen elsewhere, the basis of the colonial and modern-day populations is European immigrants, in this case from Great Britain, Germany, Italy and France. But not Spain.

An 1822 earthquake destroyed much of the city. On April 16, 1906, an 8.2 earthquake followed by a tsunami destroyed much of the rebuilt city. In one hour it leveled what had been the greatest commercial port in the South Pacific. (Two days later, the estimated 7.8 quake hit San Francisco. Both cities are on the same fault line.) There were two others that year, both registering an estimated 9.0. In 1960, a 9.0 quake destroyed 90% of the rebuilt rebuilt city. Both days of our visit, our guides assured us that they are trained what to do if there is a tremor or an earthquake.

Many new ‘gadgets’ made their South American debut in Valparaíso, no doubt due to its port-city contact with the rest of the world. E.g., the telegraph, in 1852, and the first gas lamps. In 1859, oil was discovered in the U.S. — and the market for whale oil began to dwindle, which cost the port.

We rode one of the city’s funiculars (ascensores) up one of the 45 hills.

View from the top. Being built on such terrain is not exactly optimum in such an earthquake-prone part of the world.

At the top of the funicular line we visited the Museo de Bellas Artes in the art nouveau / art deco Palaccio Baburizza. Named for the successful Croatan businessman who had it built, today the museum features 19th- and 20th-century European (and Chilean) works he amassed on trips to Europe seeking a cure for TB.

A Napoleon-era table of porcelain miniatures. Though it’s being treated, we spotted some termite eggs.

View out a palaccio window. You can see the Sun just behind the bottom iron railing. Chile supplies over 30% of the world’s copper. There was enough left over for this roof.

A Victorian-era mansion viewed from a palaccio window...

El Mercurio, the oldest continuously published Spanish language newspaper in the world...

‘Comida para perros y gattos’ means food for dogs and cats. There are many feral animals in the city, but the residents take care of them. Evidently, this gatto read the sign.

Next we boarded this trolleybus for a clang-clang-clang jaunt to the Villa Victoria. Built in the 1800s by one of the city’s wealthiest women, it was sold in 1919 to Spanish immigrants (they did let a few in) who turned it into a bakery. The family shown here restored the building and has turned it into a living museum, presenting a concise history of Chile and a glimpse of how an upper middle class family would have lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.