A two hour bus ride from Santiago is the hilly city of Valparaiso. As we arrived at our cute little and impressive Airbnb apartment on Cerro Alegre we were met by a beautiful balcony view over the city and it’s bay. We headed back down to the ‘flat’ as they call it and had a great 3 course set menu lunch in a bar called Cinzano that looked like it hadn’t changed for at least 30 years!
The next day we decided to take advantage of the free walking tours that were on offer and set on a 3 hour exploration of the city with a very funky young woman called Aida who clearly loved the city. As she explained the colouful history behind this once very rich and busy port that has since fallen into decline, it was hard not to fall for the charm of this place.
The graffiti was amazing with a mix of simple tagging, colouful graffiti and impressive large murals on every street. Some were ugly but the majority of the murals were beautiful and we found ourselves taking countless photos at every turn!
As we explored the little streets, we popped into the countless small jewelry and artesan shops – all in buildings which were obviously once houses so you felt like you were walking into someone’s home.
A stop for tea and cake in Cafe Turri was well needed. A beautiful cafe with a lovely view and a great dessert platter!
Trips on the roller coaster bus route in the hills, a trolley bus trip and ride on one of the 7 remaining active funiculars completed a fantastic day discovering this beautiful city.
That evening we decided to head out to belatedly celebrate my birthday. Having learnt by now that nowhere in South America gets going until at least 9pm, we headed out at that time to the restaurant we had decided on, only to find it completely empty! We decided to give it 30 mins so found a random Welsh bar to have a couple of cocktails before trying again. Still empty! A 20 min walk later to another couple of restaurants that were also empty confused us a little as it was a Saturday night but eventually we arrived back at our original choice Il Paparrazzo which by now at 10:15pm did at least have another couple in it!
The place was fantastic and food was amazing – gorgeous seafood parmigiana to start followed by black squid ink ravioli filled with crab in a prawn bisque for me and an octopus risotto for Dan – outstanding! A yummy passion fruit dessert followed before we decided to take a trip back to Cinzano to see what live music was playing.
The old school bar was filled to the brim with people listening to old style spanish jazz played by 2 different trios – the 80 year old smiling pianist being the same in both bands and who in his camel coloured suit looked like he hadn’t yet stepped out of the 70s!
Some audience singing and dancing completed a fabulous night in this wonderfully quirky city!
Tiredbuthappytravels 