Valparaíso is sometimes nicknamed the South American San Francisco. That has nothing to do with the cost of living and everything to do with the way it soars up skyward out of the Atacama Trench, carrying the city’s elite on its back. Some of the roads winding up the side of the cerro seem almost vertical. I get the feeling living here would give you the lungs of an Inca and the thighs of a Georgian wrestler.
It’s up here on the heights that you’ll find the house of Pablo Neruda, Casa Museo La Sebastiana.
Neruda sure knew how to pick a spot. His five-storey house, which sometimes feels more like a tower than a villa, commands one of the clearest views of the Bahía del Valparaíso. On a clear day, you can probably see for miles, but even a shroud of yellowing cloud, you could see as far as the forested hills of La Campana and the snowy heights of the Andes beyond.
Neruda had his writing room built right at the pinnacle of his Valparaíso home, so that he could draw inspiration from the beauty of the world around him, whipped eternally by the Pacific winds.
He also seems to have loved maps, especially the older ones. There’s an genuinely incredible French map of the Americas by one Monsieur le Dauphin which I absolutely must track down, as it predates the discovery of Australia, with strange, half-finished coastlines fading into nothing at the southwestern edge of the map under the title “Terra Australis Incognita”.
People seem to treat this street with profound respect. Even the graffiti is cultured.
As if in answer to my post last night, I was surprised to find the street on which Neruda’s house stands, Calle Ricardo de Ferrari, covered in verses that weren’t taken from the Chilean poet’s vast anthology, but from his Andalusian friend, Lorca. Beautifully painted into tiles from an alfarería in Granada, Lorca’s verse follows you all the way down the road, perhaps as an ode to Neruda’s efforts in saving so many Spaniards during the Civil War and bringing them here to Valparaíso, far from the tyrannous grip of Francisco Franco.
Lorca lost his life under the fascist regime. So did my great-grandfather Mateo and all of his circle of writers and poets. It’s probably no great leap of the imagination that they might even have been in contact with Andalusia’s greatest poet, since they were all writing around the same time… and all snuffed out around the same time, too. Perhaps that’s why I feel a special connection to Lorca – and why finding him here in the Southern Hemisphere is so comforting.
I didn’t buy any of his books – I can’t recall which ones I have at home – but Neruda’s magic was already at work on me. As I climbed up to the fifth floor of his house, my ears suddenly popped. My Eustachian tubes have been blocked for nearly a fortnight since that false landing in Natales, which has been a real annoyance. Flying for fourteen hours across the Atlantic and half of South America shortly before probably didn’t help, but either way, it’s been an ever-present bother since I arrived here.
But suddenly, just like that, the fuzziness in my ear wasn’t so bad anymore.
Ok, so it’s still there, but it is very definitely better than it was. I feel like I can hear properly again.
To prove that point, I stumbled upon a family of firecrowns on the way back down into the city. This time it felt like I could hear their piercing trill out of both ears. One even let me get close enough to make up for not having the lens on me (I left it behind as it weighs quite a bit, and you can’t take bags into Neruda’s pokey house).
I’ll miss the hummingbirds when I go, just like I said when I was in Peru. There aren’t as many varieties of them here as there were in the Inca capital, but the firecrowns are everywhere: particularly, wherever anybody has been kind enough to plant red hot poker flowers, which they adore.
It’s still pretty overcast out there. I think I might grab some Peruvian food for lunch, as there are quite a few places nearby, and I fancy a reminder of the delicious bowls of salty seafood I had in Paracas. If I am going to eat, it had better be sooner rather than later. The bay may look calm, but out on the open ocean it is likely to be less Pacific than it looks.
Fingers crossed for an albatross tomorrow! I’d settle for just the one! BB x
Santiago de Chile may be cursed to be a smog-bound citadel for the rest of its days, but in one particular sense, it is exceptionally well-placed: it is about an hour’s drive up into the mountains to the east for skiing during the winter months, while a hour and a half’s drive to the west will take you to the Pacific coast. Santiago’s summer sisters, Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, may only be a hundred kilometres out as the condor flies, but they are a world away from the Chilean capital. In some ways, they are decidedly European: winding streets with towering Parisian buildings, complete with tramlines and traffic lights. In others, they are absolutely Latin American: a fiercely compact cultural melting pot, with Peruvian outposts everywhere.
With my timetable still very much up to me (consisting entirely of lesson observations at the moment), I struck out early for Valparaíso today, very much in the mindset that the part of town where the bus station is – or so the books all tell me – is no place to be after dark. It took me about three hours to get here, all in all, so had I waited until I had got home, it would be around half past nine here – which is definitely pushing it, even by my standards.
So here we are, in Valparaíso, Chile’s second city. With a population of around 300,000, it’s a little larger than the hamlet of 47 in La Mancha for which it was named.
Let’s be real. I’ve come here for two things: sea lions and Pablo Neruda. I’ve been juggling my choice of poet for the Language A course for a while, between Neruda – arguably Latin America’s greatest poet – and Lorca, who I hold in especially high regard. In the end, it is Lorca who has won the day, if only because I have studied him so much over the years (and, no doubt, because I have skin in the game by being part Andalusian myself). All the same, it would be a crime not to include Neruda in the course, so I plan to use his poems to prepare my students for the unseen.
Neruda, for now, must wait. I’ll have time for that tomorrow, after the pelagic expedition. I arrived too soon to check in, so I turned my feet east and followed the coastline as far as the twin piers of Caleta Portales.
I didn’t have to go far to get my sea lion fix. The main pier of Muelle Barón may be out while the city pours time and money into what looks to be a seafront shopping mall in the making, but the real show is a few hundred metres to the east, where the skeletal ruins of an old gas company dock has become one of the favoured haul-out sites for the city’s sea lions.
Alongside the sea lions, the structure is the perch of choice for a surprising number of seabirds, given its safe distance from the shore but proximity to the fisheries. I picked out kelp gulls, Inca terns, a couple of turkey vultures, Peruvian boobies, three species of cormorant and, of course, the Peruvian pelicans that I was hoping to see again.
I thought there might be something loose in my rucksack, as I kept hearing some kind of fabric shuffling sound, but to my astonishment a man in dirty overalls clambered out from among the boulders, seemingly from some crevice beneath the very rocks upon which I had been sitting for the better part of half an hour. He acknowledged me with a gravelly “wenodía”, set down his tatty red baseball cap to mark where he had slept and then picked his way across the rocks, crouching every so often to inspect something between the crevasses of the sea wall.
Valparaíso is a lot poorer than Santiago’s uptown districts like Las Condes. That much is plain.
Moving east, I had my eyes trained on the water, on the off chance that a wandering penguin might show up. I did spot one, a fair distance from the shore, but something else entirely caught my attention – something entirely unexpected.
A marine otter.
Marine otters – known in Chile as chungungos or gatos marinos (sea cats) are not sea otters, like the fluffballs found from Baja California up along the North American coast, but they do live almost exclusively in the sea, rarely venturing into freshwater like other otters. Like sea otters, marine otters were once hunted for their pelts and are thus an endangered species, and quite a rare sight along South America’s Pacific coast. So I really wasn’t expecting to see one here, in the very heart of Valparaíso.
Apparently, marine otters are specialist feeders according to their location, with southern populations preferring fish and northern populations opting for shellfish. This must be one of the northern otters, because in the fifteen minutes or so I spent watching it before it disappeared, it must have caught and eaten at least four small lobsters.
That makes two species of rare otter I have managed to find this year: giant otters in the Amazon and marine otters in the Pacific. And I still haven’t tracked down the otters that live in the Tone, just a stone’s throw from my flat! I’m sure they’ll show up eventually. Maybe I should make that my mission, before the year is out: to see a third and final species of otter, preferably before Christmas!
Not to be outdone, the pelicans put in a good show, sailing in low over the water in that spectacular flight pattern of theirs. I have wanted to see pelicans do this since my mother told me about it after her trip to Peru back in 2015, when I wanted to be just about anywhere but Amman, and I have had the incredibly good fortune to see that sight several times this year.
It’s not the stuff Attenborough documentaries are made of, for sure, and the good people of Valparaíso must see it all the time, but it is something I will never tire of seeing.
Eventually, I reached the busy fishing port of Caleta Portales. I reached it at absolutely the right time of day, too: around noon, the fishermen throw their bycatch back into the sea, loading the scraps into repurposed shopping trolleys and dumping them over the pier into the water below. The local wildlife is well aware of this daily bounty – and, thanks to a quick Google, so was I.
If you needed a clue that the drop was imminent, you only needed to count the pelicans. They had gathered in numbers so great I struggled to put a number to them – and pelicans are not small birds by any measure. They seemed to be perched upon every surface they could find: the sea wall, car roofs, billboards, shipping crates, stalls, bridges, lampposts and on the concrete among the fishermen themselves. After seeing them at a distance in Paracas, they were now far too close for my lens!
One small perk of being here now in midwinter is that some of the adults have started to put on their smarter summer plumage, with a smart yellow tinge to their more defined white faces.
I was already aware of the immense dark shapes in the shadow of the pier, but the appearance of the fisherman with his trolley worked like a magnet, drawing the dark mass along after him, following the overpowering stench of fish – or the sudden vortex of feathers and screeching gulls that followed in his wake.
With the seafood sloshed overboard, the shoreline turned into a frenzy of activity. It didn’t take me long to pick out the bull among the sea lions massing around the shoreline: he completely dwarfed all the others, and that’s saying something.
Forget the roly-poly dumplings that you find off the coast of Britain. Sea lions are an entirely different beast. Adult males can reach a whopping three metres in length and weigh in at around 325kg. They’re also fiercely territorial, as was plain enough from the deep scars on some of the males, including the old bull.
At that size – and at this distance – they were simply too big to get on camera. The 300mm would have been useful here, I think, but it’s sitting on top of my chest of drawers back home in Somerset. As such, I had to make do with portraits of the beasts that had hauled out onto the rocks to wait their turn while the bull ate the sea lion’s share of the bycatch.
At this range, of course, you can make out a lot of detail. The thickness of their whiskers. The sharpness of their teeth. The minuscule ears at the back of their heads, and the scars on their torsos.
One male was so close you could see the whites of his eyes twice over. His eyes seemed to have misted over. He must be very old for a sea lion to have contracted such an infection. I wonder how old? They can live to be around twenty years old in the wild, I think, so this one can’t be far off that mark.
Arguably prettier than the titans hogging the spotlight was a small family of Inca terns, waiting patiently for their chance to swoop in and seize some of the scraps for themselves. This is another species I travelled all the way out to the Islas Ballestas to see, only to find them so close here in Valparaíso that they might have been eating out of my hand.
Here, at least, the lens really did put in the yards.
I hung around the port for well over an hour before deciding it was probably time to head on back to Valparaíso, have a decent lunch and check in to my hostel. The skipper advised against having a large supper ahead of tomorrow’s ocean voyage, so I made a mental note to have a decent lunch instead, and acquire some snacks for the journey home.
It’s not the most scenic route back to Valparaíso from Caleta Portales. In places, the city seems to be collapsing into the sea, and where there isn’t the salty tang of the sea, there is the sweet stench of sweat, marijuana and human faeces. There’s a lot of homelessness here. All the carriages of a derelict train seemed very much lived-in, with signs of recent occupation all over the place: a bouquet of flowers tied to the grille, a washing line strung out in the gloom behind a window, and a dog waiting patiently on the step of the driver’s car. It’s probably more homely than the crevasses among the boulders below the sea wall, though I imagine it’s not much warmer.
The city never seems to catch a break. The Spanish blew the city to pieces in 1866 during the Chincha Islands War. Forty years later, in 1906, Valparaíso was ripped apart by an extremely violent earthquake – a fairly common occurrence in this part of the world, with the city sitting squarely upon the Nazca plate boundary. Apparently, there was a small one just a few days ago off Quintero, where I am headed tomorrow. It’s quite something, seeing the tsunami warning signs all over the place.
The captain has just told me that the boat needs a service tomorrow morning, so we have rescheduled. Weather permitting, we are going ahead on Sunday. That should make my journey home a bit easier. Even so, it is likely to be my most out-of-pocket adventure yet.
Tomorrow, then, is wide open. A whole day to explore Valparaíso! I’ll make sure it starts with a good sleep and a decent breakfast. Those sea lions had a proper feast today – I might as well do the same. BB x
Four days into my teacher exchange and I’m still blissfully without a timetable as such. As a matter of fact, that’s actually quite a relief – because I keep running into new opportunities every day, and it’s helpful to be able to say yes to everyone for a change.
Today I spent the entire day in the Senior division of the school, with the equivalent year groups 10-13 (1°-4° Medio by Chilean standards). I also got my eye in on a PAES class, a preparatory class for students preparing to sit the national exams required to enter Chile’s university system, which functions much like the “seventh term” that was once offered by some British schools for Oxbridge hopefuls.
It was a bloody useful class to watch. I even had a go at the paper myself, and got only one question wrong over a 30-minute assault of two reading comprehensions. It’s not that the chosen literary texts were hard – though I’ll admit there were some words I’d never encountered – but the questions were tricky with frustratingly similar choices of answers, and often required really careful reading to decide between two of a possible four.
For the record, the texts were El barco de vapor (which I’m sure I’ve come across somewhere) and El leve Pedro – in case I decide to use them myself as part of my Language A course design. Which I very probably will.
It’s raining again. My trips to South America seem to involve a lot of rain. Since I still have no timetable set in stone – and this is a very ad hoc exchange – I’m hoping to get away early tomorrow and make for the coast, as the weather is likely to be worse next weekend, and I will be off on my travels at the end of the last week – location TBC. For now, at least, the weekend looks like Valparaíso.
Provided the fog that is rolling in off the Pacific doesn’t come sooner than expected, Saturday will see me set out on a small ship into the Pacific Ocean in search of the only bird on the planet with a wingspan larger than a condor: the albatross. I expect the sea will be more than a little choppy, but I’ve always wanted to do a proper pelagic trip, and since the days of working one’s passage on ocean liners is well and truly dead and gone, this is the next best thing.
If the weather puts a stopper in my Pacific plans, there’s plenty to see and do in Valparaíso – including the city’s resident fur seals and its plethora of seafood options. It’ll also be good to get out of the capital for a bit. Host families are lovely and all that, but eight years of living on my own have made me into a very independent sort of creature.
Someday, somebody will shake me out of that. Maybe. For now, this social battery of mine needs the solace of the sea.
I’ll get back you once I get there. It’s a bit touch and go, but the best adventures always are. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 