Valparaíso

Valparaíso is a port that climbed its own hills and never came down: forty-two cerros rise from a narrow strip of harbour like the seats of an amphitheatre, stitched together by staircases, alleys and the ascensores — the wooden funiculars, the oldest of them, Concepción, running since 1883. It was the great port of the Pacific before the Panama Canal took its trade, and it kept the houses that trade built: British, German, Italian mansions painted in every color, now covered from sill to roof in the murals that made the city one of the street-art capitals of the world. UNESCO listed it in 2003; the poets had already done so.

The traveller rides an ascensor up from the flat and walks the paseos of Cerro Concepción and Cerro Alegre for the painted houses and the views; visits La Sebastiana, Neruda's house of five floors and one crazy staircase, on Cerro Bellavista; wanders the open-air museum's murals down that same hill; eats a chorrillana and drinks the local pisco in a bar with a bay window; watches the port work from the Plaza Sotomayor; and takes the metro to Viña del Mar, ten minutes away, for the beach the city itself never had.

The Guide's honesty: Valparaíso is beautiful and worn at once — its charm and its decay are the same thing —; the hills reward walkers and punish knees, and some are safer than others after dark, so keep to the visited cerros at night and ask your host; petty theft happens where tourists gather, as in any port; and fires have burned parts of the hills more than once — the city rebuilds, and rebuilds in color.