If you have been following along, you know that we just arrived in Viña del Mar (aka Viña) this morning after an all night bus ride. We should try to rest… but you know that my travel partner is incapable of that. And, on top of that, it is early in the morning and no one is around… so we should take advantage and take some pictures. Some of these places will be extremely busy later! We cross the street from the bus station and go into the mall to get situated and plan on what to do next. We don’t have many options, so we decide to walk towards downtown. It’s not far, so that’s fine, we arrive quickly. We are also lucky because we sent our heavy bags to where we’re staying separately, so my travel partner just have his small backpack with all his cameras. Good to go!
This is the central square in Viña, Plaza Vergara. Usually it is quite full with people relaxing after a busy day downtown. But, as we said, it is still very early so no one is really out. And you may be able to tell that the ground is wet. It is sliiiiightly drizzling. It’s not bad enough that I need to hide away, but hopefully it doesn’t get any worse. Fingers crossed.
Just across the street there is a little walkway that connects Plaza Vergara to La Quinta Vergara. If you have ever heard of Viña it may have been linked to the Festival de Viña, a big music festival that has a song competition between the countries of Latin America with a lot of other famous artists. You’ve definitely heard of it if you have grown up in Latin America (we think/hope). We will get back to the festival a little later… but for now just trust us that the park that has the amphiteatre is at the end of this walkway.
The walkway is usually quite full with people that set up little tents (as you can see a few being set up) and they sell all kinds of little things. But, no one is here yet. We even go for a walk along Avenida Valparaiso (the main street in Viña) and there is no one, haha. Super weird. This city must wake up a little later than 11 am… But whatever, we continue walking and we find a shop that sells football cards and stickers. As you know, we still consider this our World Cup trip so we are still on the lookout for World Cup related things. However, there are none. They have been sold out for months and kind of look at us weird when we ask. But it can’t have been so long because they haven’t taken these signs down in the little mall area, haha.
The trading of World Cup stickers must have been quite crazy for them to have to not allow people to do it within the little mall area, haha. Crazy. But, that shows how crazy Chile is for the World Cup (and most/all of Latin America as well). The sign says “it is prohibited to sell or trade stickers in communal spaces in the mall area – respect our space – thank you,” haha. Wow. Seems like we may have just missed out… But without being able to find anything, we take a walk back towards Plaza Vergara. Our travel friend wanted some breakfast so we go just outside of La Quinta Vergara for him to get some food while we continue to wander around.
You may have noticed the above church in the distance of an earlier picture, but we take it mostly because we have spent months looking at mosques everywhere and now in this part of the world there are churches instead. But, just behind this is La Quinta Vergara. Since the Festival de Viña is so famous, we wanted to go and show you the actual amphitheatre. It is called “The Monster” and it can go very well or very poorly for an artist. It must be a great feeling when the entire crowd is screaming “gaviota” to them (the prize given out for amazing performances) but if the crowd doesn’t like you… you know, haha. We head off to try to show you a bit of Viña del Mar history… but we are quickly stopped.
No luck. The entire area is cordoned off (as you can see) without anyone being able to get even close. There are also a lot of police officers around making sure no one jumps the fence, haha. Unfortunately, this is as close as we can get. There is also a park around it, La Quinta Vergara, which is supposed to be nice to visit.. but we can’t check it out, unfortunately. We wonder who may be performing tonight… We see a lot of people selling signs with different names on them, but we don’t recognize them, ha. Not very well versed in the music of the Festival de Viña we suppose.
Our travel friend is still relaxing, so we continue exploring around. That’s fine by us because just a bit further there is a high school that is absolutely covered in murals, and you know we’re suckers for public art, hehe. We of course get a bunch of pictures.
The murals were actually painted by the students of the high school itself. And, even cooler, the paint used was a special paint called Photio, a paint that is supposed to replicate the process of photosynthesis, and is therefore supposed to help clean the air of the city. Very cool!
And as we are walking around we see all kinds of signs like below. As some of you may know, Chile sits on the “Ring of Fire,” a literal ring around the Pacific Ocean that is very prone to tectonic activity. This is why there are so many volcanoes in southern Chile and why there are often earthquakes (and very strong ones at times) that they can cause damage and tsunamis. So, it’s good to know where you have to go if there is a tsunami threat, haha. (If you visit Chile, you can feel “tremors” which are what the locals call the very low level earthquakes. These are strong enough to be felt, but generally too weak to do any sort of damage).
Our travel friend finished eating, so it’s time to decide what to do for the day. It is amazing to us that this city of over 300,000 people with a large tourist population on top of that still doesn’t seem to have woken up, haha. Or maybe we are still remembering how packed Cairo was and there is no comparison between 300,000 people and over 20 million people. Anyway, we pretend to board the train just to show off the nice entrance.
But in reality we just keep walking around in Viña. As we walk around downtown we notice that pretty much everything is painted with some sort of art. Some of it has obviously been commissioned, but others seem like nice graffiti instead. It really is a nice mix. But, depending on the time you come you will only see about half because much of it is on the metal curtains that the stores have which are rolled up when they’re open, obviously.
But, we enjoy the art all around. And you can see above that there is still an Arab presence within Chile as they sell shawarmas and kebabs, hehe. Maybe if we catch it open one of these days we can write a review comparing the shawarmas in Chile and those of the Middle East, hehe.
We aren’t really walking without a purpose… we have an aim which we will eventually get to. But we also have to show you a bit of the city as we walk around. If you’ve been following the entire trip, you know that we walk a lot and therefore see a lot of random things. And if we see random things, you see random things, haha. One could be these light posts. To the untrained eye they mean nothing and could pass without even looking twice… BUT… they indicate that this neighbourhood is an Everton neighbourhood. Everton is the professional football team based out of Viña del Mar, so obviously the neighbourhood is painted in its colours, hehe. There aren’t other teams within Viña, so we would assume that the entire city is painted yellow and blue, but without checking every corner of Viña we won’t make that claim, ha.
If you have ever been to Viña you may realize where we are headed. There isn’t much more in this direction than the famous flower clock, El Reloj de Flores. This is likely one of the reasons that Viña is also called the Garden City.
We say famous and then take a picture alone with the clock… but we’re not lying. You know we also like to show the “behind the scenes,” and a few steps back you can see the groups of people taking pictures. There are even tour groups that come here as a stop just so they can take their pictures, so you know it’s famous! Haha.
But just beyond that is pretty much the limit of Viña, the Caleta Abarca Beach. Viña is also pretty famous for its beaches. When it is really hot they are absolutely packed. As we told you, it had been drizzling earlier so it is overcast, not the best beach weather. You can tell because the people look like they are in sweaters on the beach, haha.
Around the beach there is a bit of green space that is nice to walk around and there is a path that goes right along the ocean’s edge. This is also a pretty popular place for tourists and locals alike. We would show you how pretty it is… but my travel partner decided to film it instead… He would only allow me to take the selfies below pretending to walk around. You will have to take our word for it that it is nice or wait for the video evidence to be uploaded to our Youtube page.
And as we walked along, we had to pass the Sheraton hotel. It appears in many pictures of Viña because it is right on the edge of the ocean.. but we don’t care about that. We found where everyone in Viña is, haha.
This is where the performers stay when they come to the Festival de Viña del Mar. As you can see they even set up fences on the median so people don’t cross the street and disrupt traffic going towards Valparaiso. Fans can be crazy, haha. While we walked by all of the people they must have gotten glimpses of the stars because all of a sudden people went absolutely crazy screaming Karol G’s name. We know that she is at the festival, so she must have been spotted inside. A little further we heard everyone scream Camilo’s name, so he must have also been spotted, haha. Everyone was just waiting to get the slightest glimpse of their favourite artists. But not us. We decided we would leave Viña altogether, ha. So we walked back towards a train station (not the one we showed earler) and got train tickets to leave Viña behind.
The outside of the station wasn’t as nice as the other one, but there was still art inside. There was also a place to digitally rent books, similar to what we saw in the Santiago bus station. A great idea. The train arrived quickly and we hopped on.
And ten minutes later we arrive at our destination. Welcome to Valparaiso.
We will now pass on a little something we heard while looking at coming to Chile. There were a few places that recommended staying the night in Viña but leaving immediately during the day to visit Valparaiso. They say that Viña may be a little boring for tourists and that the “real culture” is in Valparaiso. We know that Valparaiso is home to the most famous “painted hills” around where many world famous muralists come to Valparaiso to paint gigantic murals up in its hills. We hope to be able to make it to some of the most famous to take a look for ourselves, but for now these murals will have to do.
You can see that Valparaiso is actually considered a World Heritage site by UNESCO, making it even more attractive to tourists. We believe that the reason is because of the mixture of old and new architecture, the hills of Valparaiso and how the houses are packed, plus the murals that the hills contain. There are many historic buildings that are still standing as well. Just worth a visit, haha.
From above you can also see that we have left Viña del Mar and their support of Everton because now we see murals for Santiago Wanderers. The Wanderers are the professional team in Valparaiso, and they are actually part of Valparaiso’s intangible heritage. The club was founded in 1892, and is the oldest football team in Chile. So of course, there should be many paintings around the city with the green and white of the Wanderers. Mixes in well with the rest of the murals around.
Just think about this… we have literally only exited the train station and taken all of these pictures. We haven’t moved more than 100 metres, haha. There is art absolutely EVERYWHERE in Valparaiso. We’re now seeing why people say that you need to visit Valparaiso while in Chile.
And, of course, the 2019 Estallido Social (Social Explosion) could not be forgotten/missed between the art. This mural shows the protests that took place during the nationwide protests. Valparaiso is pretty much the second-most important city in Chile because of its high population (almost 1 million in the metro area), the fact that the congress building is located here, and that it is home to one of the most important ports on the Pacific Ocean. Because of all of this the protests during the Estallido Social were quite big here and would, therefore, obviously be memorialized in a mural.
But, we have to move a bit more than 100 metres in Valparaiso, haha. So we take off towards the heart of Valparaiso, “el Plan.” Just imagine to yourself that Valparaiso has so many hills that the “downtown area” is essentially called “the flat,” haha. It makes sense when you see some sources claiming that there are 42 named hills surrounding Valparaiso, while other sources claim that there are even more. It’s hard to capture… but you can see that in the below picture there are hills behind the buildings and towards the end of the road as well.
Then we walked a bit further and passed by the congress building. But… why would the congress building be here in Valparaiso when Santiago is the capital of Chile..? Well, like many political things in Chile, it can be traced back to the dictatorship.
The Chilean congress used to be in Santiago, but after the coup in 1973 congress was suspended and would not return until the return of democracy in 1990. However, when it returned it would return to a new building (the one above) in Valparaiso. The rationale was to decentralize power from Santiago. The unofficial rationale with that is that it would be a bit harder for a coup to take over the government if you had to do that in two separate cities (Santiago and Valparaiso). But, we’re not here to visit this building (we don’t think it’s open to the public, but we don’t know), so we continue walking. Eventually we make it to Plaza O’Higgins.
We didn’t actually enter the square, but because of the name the man on the horse must be Bernardo O’Higgins, one of the independence leaders in the fight for the independence of Chile from the Spanish. But, here we had to quickly jump on a bus to take us to where we would eat lunch. (Sorry we didn’t take any pictures of lunch, haha). And that was it for our time in Valparaiso, haha. We spent so much time building it up as this amazing place to go and visit and that it is so beautiful… and we didn’t show you much at all. We hope to come back before we leave… but we’re not sleeping in Valparaiso or Viña del Mar… so we need to get moving so that we can catch all of the busses to make it to our final destination of Concon. In Viña we switch busses from this regular one (below left) to a bus that better resembles a disco party (below right) and then continue on our journey to Concon.
It actually takes quite a while, but that’s fine. We’re just happy to be able to rest after an overnight bus ride, all day walking around Viña and Valparaiso, and then taking busses to where we will be sleeping. Goodnight from Concon!!