12/10/2019 – Valparaiso, Chile

We got up and had the hostel breakfast before heading out to explore a bit more of Valparaiso. It is a Saturday so there were a few more people out and about. We walked uphill to La Sebastiana – the poet Pablo Neruda’s seaside house. (We had already visited his Santiago house and liked it so much we had to see his seaside house too!) It had spectacular sea views, was beautifully higgledy piggledy, and was adorned with many of his different collections of pictures, books and maps. Josh and I both really enjoyed exploring his house with the provided audioguide. Next, we walked to Valparaiso’s cultural park. This is a walled in recreational space, with grass and a children’s playpark. There is a long building that runs along one of the sides of the park that is a former prison. On the park side of the building, it still very much looks prison like, the original bars in the small square windows. We walked through the small entrance-way into the building, and ended up in a beautiful wild garden and we could see some new build studios cleverly integrated into the old prison. There are rooms for theatre, dance, music and circus training, as well as a lab room, a large visual arts room, a theatre and an exhibition space. It is a really cool space! Within the centre of the park is an old building that used to be the gunpowder warehouse – it housed the gunpowder that was delivered through tunnels to the coast to repel British fleets in the Napoleonic Wars! The space was nice to wander around, and there was a good atmosphere. One edge of the wall provided a good view out to sea and quite a few people were sitting on it and enjoying that. There was also some sort of samba band rehearsing. Good vibes! We were really hungry by now so we walked to the Reina Victoria funicular, very Wes Anderson! It only cost the equivalent of 11p. It was so old fashioned and rickety, it was almost scary. Even the turnstyles we went through looked cool - old fashioned brass counters counting the number of people in and out. We had a late lunch in a restaurant with a beautiful view at the top of the funicular. We had some nice Chilean wine and then went on to have some mojitos in the bar opposite our hostel! We finished the night in a bar in the neighbourhood, and came back to our hostel via the same furnicular as earlier in the day!