Street Art in Valparaiso

Valparaiso is Chile’s main port, sitting on the Pacific coast about 140 km north-west of Santiago. A lot of the city sits on a flat plain running along the coast, but behind this rise a couple of steep hills, steep enough to warrant the building of a funicular. The buildings on the slopes and at the top are older than much of the lower city, often with narrow, and sometimes cobbled streets.

Valparaiso is well known for its street art, large murals decorating the sides of buildings. The images often depict everyday things. These are often life-sized but stylised. One of the first we saw was of two women, with oversized flat looking oval faces, sitting on what had been the sill round the foot of a building but which had been transformed by the artist into a seat. The building itself was now made of large rounded stones, rather than the normal whitewashed plaster, with an almost cartoon-like white arched window through which you could see a night-time reflection of the city in front.

As we walked back down the steep hill, we came to the of one street, marked by a fence, with a staircase leading down from between it and the last building. The whole staircase had been painted white, but as we walked down, I noticed that half the width of the left-hand end of some of the steps had been painted black. When I reached the bottom I turned to see how far behind my friends were. The edges of the steps had split the staircase into a regular series of white rectangles. From this angle the painted black sections of the steps were now visible, either in pairs or in threes: we’d just walked down a piano keyboard! And at the top, on the side of that last building, the fence had carried on, with a typical Valparaiso character standing looking over the city below.

We’d gone back up the hill for dinner that evening and as we walked back to the hotel, me with cane in hand in the dimly lit streets, we came across one of the street artists. He told us that, in theory, they were supposed to have some sort of permit to do this, but I got the impression that this wasn’t rigorously enforced. He was painting the head of a rhea, the South American equivalent of an ostrich. With its feathers sticking wildly up from the top of its head and with its large staring eyes, it didn’t look happy to see us. Which was a shame! For me, this was the most beautiful of all the paintings we’d seen: the perfect note on which to end our exploration of Valparaiso.