Valparaíso: Chilean City of Both Natural and Painted Views

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Day 21, 2023 Grand South America and Antarctica

Friday, Oct. 27, 2023; San Antonio, Chile

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade! We didn’t exactly get lemons today, but our tour guide gave us quite the surprise to make up for the fact that the scheduled winery was closed for a holiday.

Today’s port was San Antonio, about an hour or so from Santiago, the capital of Chile. Until about five years ago, cruise shops docked in Valparaíso, a city with much more to offer tourists than San Antonio – such as walking right off the ship into town. Labor disputes resulted in the move to San Antonio, an industrial port that requires a shuttle bus just to leave the port area.

In 2020, we took a winery tour that somehow got offtrack (we believe the driver was lost) and spent much of the time cruising backroads this way and that. This time, I opted for a tour focused on Valparaíso, which I thought would be a picturesque town to sketch. It turns out to be a big city, pretty old but scarred by earthquakes and even tsunamis.

Our surprise came with a deviation to Viña del Mar, the upscale cousin to Valparaíso with a long stretch of beach lined with apartments and condos. Our guide took us to his beachfront apartment, where he and his wife offered champagne and red and white Chilean wines, along with finger food.

Here we saw how a mining engineer from Germany, who fell in love with guiding tours and a Chilean wife, lives in Chile. If I lived here, I would be hard-pressed to leave the apartment and its view of the beach. But Michael had a final surprise: We gathered on the lawn for a delightful puppet show. He really did go the extra mile to make sure we had a fun day.

During the pandemic, I wrote about the mural project in my sister Eloise’s hometown of Fort Smith, Ark. It has nothing on Valparaíso, or even yesterday’s port of Coquimbo. Beautiful murals are everywhere, mixed in with graffiti. I have dozens of photos, but I’ll just mix a representative few in here along with the description of our day.

Valparaíso is about as hilly as it can get, and several times Michael mentioned the similarities to San Francisco. Both suffered devastating earthquakes in 1906. And Valparaíso’s port, in particular, suffered from the loss of business after the Panama Canal opened.

I just had time to sketch the outline of the Naval Headquarters at Plaza Sotomayor before we walked along the old financial district to an ascensores, or funicular. These dot the downtown area, carrying locals up the hills to their residences. Elsewhere, long flights of steps suffice.

Murals of all sizes cover every surface, from kiosk sides to retaining walls, from doors to inside walls.

I know that the Chilean flag is similar to that of my home state of Texas, but it still catches my eye every time I see it. Apparently, it is a common mistake to confuse the two. One legislator recently introduced a bill calling on Texans to stop using the wrong emoji.