Cultural revolution

Valpara&iacuteso, its nineteenth-century grandeur long dissipated by the building of the Panama Canal into at best a mangy, snaggle-toothed charm, like a drunk at the start of another long night, is in the midst of a refashioning, its rough edges repackaged as just rakish enough for the discerning tourist who fancies himself too sophisticated, too edgy for the white sand beaches and moneyed smugness of nearby Vi&ntildea Del Mar. It is a tribute to Valpara&iacuteso that glimpses of its antic spirit remain.

Described in its heyday as the &lsquojewel of the Pacific&rsquo, the impetus for the Chilean city&rsquos latest facelift was Unesco&rsquos conferral, in 2003, of world heritage status on its historic seaport. Around every corner is a mural a slogan a poem paintings graffiti influenced by manga, hip hop...or allende. everywhere allende.

Valpara&iacuteso&rsquos growing appeal as a tourist destination is evident mostly in some chic restaurants, in the boutique hotels and stalls selling tchotchkes, in fresh coats of paint for the historical pastel-coloured houses that lean over a blue swathe of ocean from precipitous hills. This geographical felicity, this perennially pleasing confluence of hills and sea, accounts for only part of Valpara&iacuteso&rsquos charm. The glorious views are made more piquant by the city&rsquos culture the early composite, cosmopolitan culture (and raucous nightlife), typical of port cities, evolved, as Valpara&iacuteso slid inexorably towards poverty and neglect, into an equally varied, complex culture of art and radical thought. The raucous nightlife remained constant.

A street mural

The glorious views are made more piquant by the city's culture the early composite, cosmopolitan culture, typical of port cities, evolved into an equally varied culture of art.

The city&rsquos politics, its desires, its imagination, its subconscious is splashed on its peeling walls. Graffiti is how Valpara&iacuteso expresses itself. Around every corner, up another of the endless sets of stairs, on the side of a shop, a house, a restaurant, is a street mural a political slogan a poem paintings that are realistic, surreal, pastoral, urban graffiti that is influenced by Manga, by hip hop, by video games, by love for Pink Floyd, your girlfriend of three weeks, or Salvador Allende. Everywhere Allende. The beloved socialist ex-president was born in Valpara&iacuteso. Then again, so was Augusto Pinochet. The September 11 that matters in Chilean history is that date in 1973 when Allende&rsquos democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup led by Pinochet.

On the plane to Santiago, I read Clandestine in Chile, Gabriel Garc&iacutea M&aacuterquez&rsquos account of life under Pinochet. M&aacuterquez tells the story of the Chilean filmmaker Miguel Litt&iacuten, who was among the many thousands exiled by Pinochet. He returned to Chile in 1985, disguised as an Uruguayan businessman, to make a documentary, to see the country he had been forced to leave twelve years earlier and to thumb his nose at the dictator. M&aacuterquez, by then already a Nobel laureate, wrote Clandestine in Chile in the first person, adopting Litt&iacuten&rsquos voice, so the book reads like a diary of subversion. M&aacuterquez (well, Litt&iacuten) observes that &ldquothe Allende cult is most visible in Valpara&iacuteso.&rdquo It was in the city of his birth that Allende developed a passion for chess, where his grandfather founded Chile&rsquos first secular school and where, M&aacuterquez writes, &ldquohe read his first theoretical works in the home of an anarchist shoemaker.&rdquo It is possible still to imagine an anarchist shoemaker in Valpara&iacuteso, living in a small apartment on a winding lane high up in the hills, contemptuous perhaps of the gentrified city, of the way even the most iconoclastic graffiti now attracts tourist dollars and by extension official sanction and approval.

Sotomayor Square

I am in Valpara&iacuteso with my wife to attend the wedding of our friends. The bride is French but her father is Chilean (a Valpara&iacuteso-born intellectual forced, like Litt&iacuten, into exile in Paris) and, at the reception, on an elegant terrace with an expansive view of the sun setting over the Pacific, he sang his city&rsquos songs, shared its stories and for me a foreign city suddenly seemed familiar, a city I too could love. My wife attributes my mawkishness that night to too many pisco sours, Chile&rsquos addictive national cocktail, but I prefer to think I was moved by a serendipitous glimpse into a city&rsquos soul. Valpara&iacuteso, until Pinochet, was the sort of place people escaped to from other, greyer parts of the world.

If Allende had a cult following in Valpara&iacuteso, the &ldquocult of Pablo Neruda&rdquo wrote M&aacuterquez, &ldquoalso thrives among the new generation, and the poet&rsquos former seaside home at Isla Negra has become its shrine&hellipa mecca for lovers from the world over.&rdquo Neruda, who took his pseudonym from a late nineteenth-century Czech poet whom he has eclipsed in the minds of much of the world, was a great friend of Allende. An irrepressible bon vivant, Neruda served around the world as a Chilean diplomat and was already Latin America&rsquos most famous poet. The volume that drew the pilgrims, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was published when Neruda was barely twenty years old. He died just twelve days after Pinochet&rsquos coup, having already experienced exile when Gonz&aacutelez Videla, in the grip of the Cold War, outlawed communism in Chile in 1948. Untended under Pinochet, Isla Negra is once again a prominent tourist attraction. Neruda had houses in Valpara&iacuteso and Santiago too, the latter named &lsquoLa Chascona&rsquo, after the tangled red hair of his third wife.

My short visit left me no time for a day in Isla Negra but it should be on your itinerary. I did visit his other houses and both are monuments to Neruda&rsquos ludic, eccentric humour. La Sebastiana, the Valpara&iacuteso house, is a paean to shipbuilding with portholes for windows, model ships, maps, junk salvaged from wrecks and an uninterrupted view, from the top three floors, where Neruda lived, of the ocean. Neruda, incidentally, was terrified of sailing. Like his friend Jorge Luis Borges, Neruda&rsquos attachment to adventure was intellectual, the ocean a muse to be contemplated, to be celebrated &mdash from a safe distance. La Sebastiana is littered with Neruda&rsquos collections of gewgaws, objects picked up from his wanderings with no value other than the spark they lit in his imagination or their value as topics of dinner table conversation with his many friends. The house, like Valpara&iacuteso itself, is a glorious jumble.

&nbspLa Sebastiana is one of the stops I make in seven hours walking the city in the company of Michael, a German transplant known throughout the city as the German pirate and under which name he conducts his tours. He was wearing a German pirate T-shirt on the day we met, a nom de guerre that has nothing to do with German politics, his home country&rsquos Pirate Party founded long after he had decamped to Chile. Michael, like the Australian owner of the Yellow House, the bed and breakfast where I stayed, moved to Valpara&iacuteso for love. After the tour, sitting on a bus together, Michael told me a little about his extraordinary life as an engineer in the former East Germany, about his botched attempt to defect and his subsequent interrogation and imprisonment. Barely solvent, the East Germans often sold unsuccessful defectors to West Germany, the price higher for educated, employable men, and so Michael made it to the other side of the Wall anyway. He came to Chile on holiday, met a woman and found it easy to leave Germany, by then unified, behind.

His walking tour is a treat because he is a hobbyist, a collector of Valpara&iacuteso arcana, of old pictures and odd facts, and blessed with an alert eye. He took me into an old lady&rsquos once fine mansion. She was hobbled over and in the early stages of dementia, though still sharp enough to greet us at the door and show us around her dimly-lit house full of the bric-a-brac of the old Valpara&iacuteso bourgeoisie &mdash sepia-tinted photographs an upright piano, the keys yellow with age cabinets full of curiosities and crystal heavy dark wood furniture. Then he took me to the holiday home of a politician, away in Santiago and unaware perhaps that Michael showed tourists around his vast house. As in India, Chilean politicians do well for themselves. Hung in the house were huge hand-woven tapestries purchased at eye-watering expense in the bathroom was a magnificent clawfoot tub and then there was the balcony, from which guests at the politician&rsquos annual party (an invitation to which is apparently a sine qua non for entry into the city&rsquos elite) watched Valpara&iacuteso&rsquos elaborate New Year&rsquos fireworks.

Michael&rsquos tour also takes in the newly established open-air museum twenty murals painted on city walls by some of the country&rsquos most acclaimed artists. It&rsquos a particularly effective example of the way Valpara&iacuteso plans to market itself to tourists, as a city that embraces its bohemian traditions. The open-air museum, where often there will be groups of picturesque Chilean kids, lank-haired boys and their pale, pretty girlfriends, hanging around with cigarettes and a guitar, or the exquisite Paseo Gervasoni with its handicraft stalls, bijoux caf&eacutes and expensive real estate, is the Valpara&iacuteso of the tourist brochures. Paseo Gervasoni is at the top of the Ascensor Concepci&oacuten, the city&rsquos oldest funicular, the cable car system that takes people, nowadays mostly tourists, up the steep hills. The funiculars are a major draw. Concepci&oacuten is the most popular, taking you up to Paseo Gervasoni and Cerro Alegre and down to the Reloj Turri, the clock tower. For the panoramic views, though, take the Artiller&iacutea funicular.

A potential problem with my so strongly recommending Michael&rsquos walking tour is that local tour guides must see him as an interloper, stealing their business. And they probably need the money more. It&rsquos unlikely though that they can provide the same service, the same attention to detail and flexibility. From the local guides&rsquo perspectives, the German pirate is less a catchy moniker than it is an accurate description. Bear in mind, you are likely to need a guide. Valpara&iacuteso still has a rough reputation and it&rsquos easy to get lost. My own experience was trouble free but the stories told, ruefully by tourists and with gleeful Schadenfreude by taxi drivers, are mostly about pickpockets, scam artists and muggers who prey on the slow-witted.

My wife and I did wander Valpara&iacuteso&rsquos grand squares by ourselves, with their monuments to Chilean heroes like Arturo Prat and their signature buildings. The squares and port are full of tourists but also drunks flinching from the sun and stray dogs, much friendlier than the kind you come across in Delhi. When we were in Valpara&iacuteso, in October, walking past the ornate buildings which house the city&rsquos banks, we suddenly felt our eyes fill and our throats burn. My nose stung. I thought it might have been pollutants from the construction site nearby but it turned out to be traces of the tear gas used by the police to quell students demonstrating for their right to affordable public education. The tear gas had stayed in the air for two full days. The experience instantly strengthened my admiration for the protesters. These demonstrations, ongoing since June, have already made an icon of the personable student leader Camila Vallejo, voted person of the year by readers of the British newspaper The Guardian. It felt fitting to be in Valpara&iacuteso as Chilean students fought to remake their society, to see the city&rsquos radical heart still beating.

 The information

Getting there

You&rsquoll have to fly to Santiago airport, 85km from Valpara&iacuteso. Air France offers connections via Paris. The Delhi-Santiago fare is approx. Rs 100,000.

Visas

You&rsquoll need to apply for a Chilean visa in person at the Embassy of Chile (146, Jor Bagh, Delhi 110003 011-24617123). A single-entry visa costs US$20. See echileindia.com/visa.htm for more information.

Currency

The currency is the Chilean peso. Rs 1 = approx. CLP 10.

Where to stay

Find a bed & breakfast. The Yellow House (from CLP 18,000/sgl theyellowhouse.cl), where I stayed, is excellent with particularly splendid views. It&rsquos run by a jovial Australian, only too keen to talk cricket, and his Chilean wife. But you may prefer to stay where the action is in Concepci&oacuten or Cerro Alegre. The Brighton (from CLP 28,571 brighton.cl), a bright yellow Victorian house in Concepci&oacuten, attracts a young crowd. It has a restaurant that offers live music on Fridays and Saturdays its elegant patio is full on summer mornings with the beautiful people. The surest sign of the fading of Valpara&iacuteso&rsquos once rough and ready reputation is the explosion of expensive boutique hotels. Two of the best are the Gran Hotel Gervasoni (US$179, including breakfast hotelgervasoni.com), with its glorious terrace and location at the heart of Concepci&oacuten and Casa Higueras (from US$285 casahigueras.cl), in nearby Cerro Alegre, arguably the finest, most elegant hotel in town.

Where to eat & drink

Valpara&iacuteso, increasingly attractive to tourists, now has a number of fashionable restaurants. Its street food is so cheap and tasty&mdashempanadas stuffed with cheese and shrimp, or the chorrilana, a hodgepodge of French fries, grilled beef and fried egg&mdashthat I didn&rsquot sample too many of the city&rsquos restaurants. I did have one fine meal in Gervasoni, at the boutique hotel, and another at Pasta e Vino (Tuesday to Saturday 1pm to 3.30pm and 8pm to midnight pastaevinoristorante.cl), by common consent the city&rsquos finest restaurant. Valpara&iacuteso was famous at various times in its history for its rowdy nightlife. Sailors&rsquo towns rarely lack for brothels and bars. You may struggle to find too many of the former now but there are still plenty of the latter. Bar la Playa (Serrano 568, 32-259-4262), just off the grand Plaza Sotomayor, is particularly atmospheric. The bar is a century old and perfectly reflects Valpara&iacuteso&rsquos rakish, scruffy appeal. It&rsquos also a visual delight, full of memorabilia and enticing junk.

What to see & do

The bus trip, cheap and comfortable, from Santiago takes about 90 minutes. Three days in Valpara&iacuteso, including a day trip to Isla Negra, is plenty. Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda&rsquos house is in Isla Negra, his favourite of his three Chilean houses and a paean to his love of the sea and ships. You must hire a guide here. The English tour costs CLP 3,500. La Sebastiana, his house in Valpara&iacuteso, is also amusing and worth a visit. General entry with a guide is CLP 3,000. fundacionneruda.org

The Naval and Maritime Museum is particularly fascinating if, like me, you were ever entranced by stories of pirates and privateers. The museum hearkens back to Valpara&iacuteso&rsquos golden age, a port famous enough to merit mention in Moby Dick. The main purpose of the museum, of course, is to display the history of the Chilean navy, its battles and its heroes. The Artiller&iacutea funicular you take up to the museum has the most spectacular views. There is a CLP 500 entrance charge. See enjoy-chile.org/valparaiso-museums-chile.php for basic information about the city&rsquos museums.

Only a few of the funiculars, a cable and pulley system that transports people up Valpara&iacuteso&rsquos steep hills, are preserved. Concepci&oacuten is the oldest, taking you to the charming Paseo Gervasoni and Cerro Alegre, while Artiller&iacutea is the prettiest. Fares are cheap, CLP 300. At the Cemeterio de Disidentes you can find the assorted tombs and grand mausoleums of British and German seamen who made their way to Valpara&iacuteso, called dissidents and buried separately because they weren&rsquot Catholics. You will find the earliest Lutheran churches in the city too.

Walking tours are essential to enjoy Valpara&iacuteso, through the city&rsquos squares and historic port area and up into the hills. Valpara&iacuteso had Latin America&rsquos first stock exchange, and other grand buildings from its heyday. As you walk you will find once grand buildings in various states of decay, with sweeping marble staircases and ornate doors. I recommend the German Pirate (see myvalparaiso.cl for prices) but there are several walking tours, many self-guided, to be found online. The Open Air museum, Museo a Cielo Abierto, the city&rsquos murals and street art are its greatest pleasure. If you can go to bring in the New Year, Valpara&iacuteso, where it&rsquos summer, has a three-day party.