Michael Batson

Two hours drive by bus from Santiago is the port of Valparaiso, until the early 1900s Chile’s first city. Testament to its former glories, Valparaiso was home to Latin America’s first stock exchange and the oldest continuous Spanish language newspaper in the world.

Valparaiso once served as an important stopover for ships sailing between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, where they could either prepare or recover from the torment of the Straits of Magellan. During its heyday, it was known as “Little San Francisco”. Completion of the Panama Canal almost killed off its maritime significance.

The city sits in a stunning geographic setting and is nicknamed the “Jewel of the Pacific”.

Valparaiso was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO in 2003 based upon its improvised urban design, unique architecture and its natural amphitheatre-like setting. Santiago is the capital but many of the legislative bodies reside here. It’s described as an “exceptional testimony to the early phase of globalization in the late 19th century.”

The territory was originally inhabited by Chango Indians, who lived on farming and fishing.

Today, Valparaiso is home to Chile’s navy and one of the country’s most important seaports as well as the country’s cultural capital. Looking out over the bay a vast armada is moored like some invading force. Chile’s landed elite have long sent their sons to serve in the armed forces, with the navy the preferred choice.

For this reason, it is the navy that is the most conservative wing of the armed forces. It was the navy that provided the impetus for the 1973 military coup that toppled Salvador Allende.

Down by the port is the fish market. You can smell it before you see it. The fish workers flock to the tiny restaurants and cafes in the side streets, where you can get a good feed. Wandering these streets is ok during the day, but it’s not a good place to be after dark.

Distinctive, historic trolley buses plough the main thoroughfares of the city. Ascending the steeps hillsides encircling the main business district are funicular cable cars, up to 30 of them. Rickety transport, they noisily make their way up and down the precipitous heights passing the shanty towns. One is seen the Motorcycle Diaries, the autobiographical movie of the Argentine Che Guevara, who came here on his journey of discovery across South America before culminating in his journey to Cuba.

At the southern end of the bay is the Cerro Artilleria, a strategic defensive spot, hence the name, “Artillery Hill”. Cannons still dot the location with a commanding view of the bay and any approaching craft. Here you will find the Naval Museum, or Museo Naval y Maritimo. Exhibits include historical paintings, swords, various navigational paraphernalia, and some rather ornate uniforms.

School students crowded through the facility more fascinated with the foreigners than with the exhibits. There was lots of whispering, giggling and curious looks.

The Guerra del Pacifico (1879-1884) secured for Chile the vast mineral riches of the Atacama Desert at the expense of Peru, and removed for Bolivia its sea port, rendering the Andean nation landlocked. Chile’s neighbours still harbour deep resentment at the war’s outcome, which lingers to this day occasionally threatening to boil over into further conflict.

Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean Communist poet and politician, Ricardo Eliezer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, chosen in honour of the Czech poet Jan Neruda.

The Latin Neruda spent his life either being honoured by the Chilean authorities or outlawed by them.

In 1971 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of only a handful of Latin Americans to do so. In 1948 Neruda spent months in hiding in Valparaiso after the conservative government outlawed communism. For years after he lived in exile.

Neruda published his first work at just 13, but his early years were plagued by poverty. His dire financial situation forced him to join the diplomatic service taking up posts as Chilean consul in countries around the world. His biography recalls a story where Neruda on a jaunt around Jakarta in his spare time, embarks on a drinking session with an orangutan at the city’s zoo.

Valparaiso is imprinted on Neruda’s psyche, his views of the city vividly expressed in poetic style. When not in hiding or on the run, he spent time at Isla Negras, his home near the city which he bought in 1939 from a Spanish sea captain. It had no running water and no main electricity.  Neruda flew a blue flag with a white fish, collected wooden statues and old ships’ figureheads.

Isla Negras became a haven for writers and artists. After the 1973 military coup, the authorities desecrated the house. At the time Neruda lay dying in hospital.

From its windows he could watch the whales migrating to the tropical South Pacific. Here he housed his library collected over thirty years and containing over 5000 volumes, many first editions. He donated his collection to a university.

Whereas he found Santiago a captive city behind walls of snow, and now you could add smog, Valparaiso, on the other hand, “throws its doors wide to the infinite seas, to its street cries, to the eyes of children.”

He thought it “secretive, sinuous, winding” where “poverty spills over its hills like a waterfall.” Of its life, he said Valparaiso “twitches like a wounded whale. It flounders in the air, is in agony, dies, and comes back to life.”

Earthquakes are a part of life in Chile as it sits on the notorious Ring of Fire, where giant tectonic plates meet. Every native of the city carries in them the memory of an earthquake. The city was hit by a quake in 1906 which killed 3000, the same year that San Francisco was destroyed, causing damage especially in the downtown area, and leading to substantial reconstruction programmes. In 2010, another huge quake measuring 8.8 struck the city.

South of Valparaiso at Valdivia they experienced a quake in 1960 so violent it broke the Richter Scale, and became known as the Great Chilean Earthquake, the most powerful quake ever recorded at 9.5.  The resulting tsunami spread out across the entire Pacific Ocean.

Valdivia is named after the conquistador, Pedro de Valdivia, who founded Valparaiso in 1544.  Valparaiso’s inhabitants took to the hillsides after a disastrous earthquake in 1730, thus developing the most characteristic feature of the town.

Neruda saw the history of the port city as a struggle, a “rugged tug-of-war between the sea and nature, but it was man who won the battle little by little.”

Nearby Valparaiso is Vina del Mar (Vineyard by the Sea), a kind of Costa del Chile. With a Mediterranean climate, its full of beaches and high-rise apartments. The nouveau-riche prowl the streets in SUVs with blackened windows before disappearing behind the high walls of their high rises.

Here the Chilean president has a summer residence.

The railway was built with English assistance. They brought their sport with them, so the local football team is named Everton, after its English counterpart.

Here too nature has played its part, with most of the old town progressively destroyed by the ground shaking in various earthquakes. So much of the new development looks like a Miami imitation.

The beach seemed full of broken glass and the small river dividing the town rather polluted. Now the town is full of shopping malls and bars and is home to the country’s oldest casino.

Neruda was a man of Chile. He believed that a man should live in his own country. “I cannot live without having my feet and hands on it and my ears against it, without feeling the movement of its waters and its shadows, without feeling my roots reach down into its soil for maternal nourishment.”

Valparaiso by the sea.