From Villarrica I did a big jump, and got on a bus to Valparaíso, 850 km further north. This was a night bus, which means I saw nothing of the landscape in between. (There are some national parks in that space that trickled my interest, but they were all closed because of the risk for forest fires.)
One of my guidebooks describes Valparaíso as "a wonderful mess", and that is very apt. The city has a downtown, known as El Plan, which is the flat part of the city down by the sea. While there are some older grandious buildings here, what makes Valparaíso special is the 40+ plus hills ("cerros") that climb up from El Plan with winding streets and alleys, with all sorts of dwellings: ramshackles, nice small houses, fine villas and occasional high-rises. Adding to all this is that Valparaíso is a city of grafitti. And not just only meaningless tags (although there is more than plentiful of this as well), but also lots of very fine murals of high artistic value.
The joy is just to walk around in all this and adore the views that seems to be constantly changing. To illustrate this, I present the pictures exactly in the order they were taken.
Valparaíso is not only a tourist attraction. It is also one of the most important port cities in Chile, and it is also the legislative captial of Chile. That is, this is where the parliament sits.
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