Valparaiso or short (Valpo) is just a short 2h bus drive from Santiago and Busses go every 15 min. So we left our hiking stuff behind and traveled lightweight to this colored city by the sea side. The city is quite exceptional distributed over 45 hills that are connected by ancient elevators and rainbow colored stairs.

Going up the stairs never gets boring here.

We were adviced that there are some hills that we certainly don’t want to go to, but actual we didn’t felt threatened at any point. It’s nearly impossible to walk around between the painted houses and not just be amazed by the beautiful pictures that decorate most of the walls. Street art is actual illegal in whole chile, but if the owner of the wall (and even the city itself) gives the permission it is okay to paint in them. So many street artist come here to life and paint. Unfortunately also many other people own spray cans and leave their tags (signs) on our next to the paintings. You can probably walk around in ages and discover new paintings every time (since many artist are still very young they will hopefully continue painting for many years).

You find surely thounds of simple graffities decorating the walls (legal or illegal).

The couple „color distinto“ and their elaborated paintings changed the view on graffities and the face of Valparaiso substantially.

But also many other artist leave their traces over the city, working together they create pieces like this one.

Aside from that Valpo is absolutely a place to enjoy life. On our first night we attended a wine tasting organized by a guy from our hostel were we came to try many different Chilean wines and cheese and chatted with other guest from our hostel, so even the tasting was over we kept on drinking beers on the plaza in front if our hostel listening to the street music until 3 am. This also led to a very late breakfast the next day so all we managed to do was to attend the free walking tour before we ended up on the plaza again eating the Chilean version of a hotdog and drinking beer again.

Trying chliean „Riesling“ …

… chilean simply but very tasty cow cheese …

… and enjoying very nice company.

When we arrived at the Plaza Descanso in front of our hostel it just started to get to life with artisits and musicians, so we got more beer and settled for a few more hours.

Drinking beer in chilean. You get a glass filled with some lemon juice and its rim covered in salt. Then you add the beer and spices as you like. The first sip is weird but it get continously better.

The chilean version of Hotdog comes with huge amounts of fresh tomatos and avocado topped with ketchup and mayonese.

The sandboards are hardly more than a painted wooden board with straps. To wax it (which you have to do every 30 m) you get an old piece of candle.

So we had two choices stop drinking beer or extend our stay. We extended the stay to five nights so we had the time to go sand boarding, taking a boat tour, learn even more about graffiti, and dance to the drum music on our favorite plaza (we stopped dancing at 2 am, unfortunately they kept playing until 8:30 am so there wasn’t much sleeping that night).

We didn’t got a word of what the guide was telling us, but he made sure we were all well prepared for the 30 min ride.

We also met some of the marine locals of Valpo. They didm’t even bothered to turn there heads to us.

Overall Valpo is a really fun but very exhausting place. Absolutly recommendable.