Beautiful, beautiful Valparaiso

It was only a couple of hours bus ride into Valparaiso & neither of us really know what to expect as we hadn't done any research on the area, but after just a hour of walking around the streets we immediately loved the place. There's a huge naval base here so it's ovally down by the port. And as you can imagine there are some incredible local fish restaurants here - where of course the menu is only in Spanish so you have to improvise & point at dishes and hope for the best! But that's part of the fun.
There are also lots of little parks and winding, charming streets that makes it such a lovely place to idle hours away. We found a really lovely bar that's themed like a ship (called the Galleon) and the locals were so friendly that we quickly got chatting to Carlos the owner. Who proceeded to take us in person to the Post office after we'd enquired for directions only………..and then he insisted on paying for the tram ride up to an area called 'Conception'
The views here literally took our breath away. You can see for Miles across the city & the sea views, plus many of the houses here are painted beautiful pastel colours - pink, blue, yellow. It's like a fairytale village in the sky. We loved it here! So much in fact one day we just took a picnic & sat in a bench for a few hours & wandrered aroun the streets discovering art galleries & trinket shops

We also visited 'Vina del Mar' which is only a 20 min ride on the local bus, and it has a really nice beachfront. It seem this is the place where most of the locals go to at the weekends as the beach was packed.

written by

mich_and_dan_moors on February 3, 2012 from Valparaiso, Chile

from the travel blog: mich_and_dan_moors's Travel Blog

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