“Pancho”

Chile’s San Francisco,
Looks for World Heritage status 

South America has an abundance of World Heritage Sites, including Machu Picchu, the city of Salvador de Bahia in Brazil and the magnificent Iguaçu Falls on the Brazilian-Argentinian border.

It also has some wannabes, sites that UNESCO has invited to apply for World Heritage Site status. Among them is the Chilean port of Valparaiso, a hill-clinging harbor town whose dense structures and incline-climbing funiculars remind many sailors and visitors of San Francisco.

(The comparisons to its distant northern counterpart go even further. Valparaiso’s inhabitants refer affectionately to it as “Pancho,” which is the Spanish diminutive for Francisco – as in San Francisco.)

Also like San Francisco, Valparaiso was a very important port during the 19th century, an era that saw the Pacific coasts of both North and South America undergo rapid development, much of it spurred by mineral discoveries. Chile, separated from the rest of South America by the Andes to the east and deserts to the north, turned to the sea as its economic lifeline. The sheltered bay at Valparaiso quickly became the country’s most important harbor.

Forced to build up the steep hills rise from the bay, Valparaiso developed a distinctive architecture of tightly-packed houses and buildings, many of them built on stilts that remind some visitors of the hillside dwellings in Hollywood and West Los Angeles that seem to hover over the abyss. Unlike San Francisco’s streets, which follow a rigid grid pattern that conquers hills rather than conforms to them, most of Valparaiso’s streets wind horizontally along the hills, connected to the streets above and below them by hairpin turns and stairways everywhere. Some say even the oldest, most experienced townspeople can easily become lost in the maze of streets in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

Valparaiso’s downtown, which serves a municipal population of 300,000, is squeezed into a narrow ledge of land – some of it reclaimed from the bay – between the harbor and the base of the hills. The result is a dense, compact assemblage of buildings where every inch of space counts. Because of its location on well-traveled sea lanes, catering to ships that had rounded Cape Horn or were headed to it, the city became wealthy enough to support a university and major banks. It was along Calle Prat (Prat Street), still lined with dignified five and six-story financial buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, that South America’s first stock exchange opened.

Despite its location only 70 miles north of the booming Chilean metropolis of Santiago, Valparaiso remains an important administrative center, as well as the site of the country’s naval academy and congress. As Chile’s largest seaport, the city shelters an active fishing fleet, an industry that lends charm and clamor to the harbor while supporting some of the best seafood  restaurants on South America’s Pacific coast.

But Valparaiso is not all business. Six miles to its north is Viña del Mar (“vineyard of the sea”), Chile’s version of La Jolla, South Beach, Punta del Este and Rio rolled into one. This is traditionally the nation’s most cherished seashore, a haven for people of all classes, with its beautiful gardens, wide range of hotels and restaurants, night and cultural life, and even a gambling casino. Chile’s late great poet, Pablo Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize, lived near here. Stretching north from Viña del Mar along a rocky coast are newer, sometimes hipper beach resorts that cater to middle-class families, trendies and the very wealthy.

Visitors to Valparaiso come away with a sense of the combination of raffishness and industriousness that have marked Chileans throughout their history. Like Chile, the face it presents to the world is an endearing combination of charm, grit, beauty and the occasional wacky grin. — Patrick Totty