Valparaíso
— a port that climbs the hills in stripes of paint.
Not only on a wall.
“A port that climbs. Forty-odd hills rise straight from the harbour, each laced with painted clapboard houses, narrow stairways, and the cable cars locals still call ascensores. UNESCO listed the historic quarter in 2003. The light off the Pacific catches the wall colours late in the afternoon, when the fog has burned off and the freighters wait in the bay.
Valparaíso, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Valparaíso lies on Chile's central coast, about one hundred and twenty kilometres northwest of Santiago, in the Valparaíso Region. The city is built on more than forty hills, the cerros, which rise from a narrow plain at the harbour to ridges several hundred metres above the sea. It was the principal Pacific port of South America in the nineteenth century, when sailing ships rounding Cape Horn called here before the Panama Canal opened in 1914. UNESCO inscribed the historic quarter on the World Heritage list in 2003.
The hills carry their colour openly. Clapboard houses, sheet-metal walls, and stairway risers are painted in flat blocks of cobalt, mustard, coral, and sea-green, often repainted by neighbours and tagged over by muralists from the open-air gallery on Cerro Bellavista. The palette traces back to the port's nineteenth-century shipyards, where leftover marine paint was carried up the hills for domestic use. Late-afternoon light off the Pacific saturates the walls; the colours read deepest about an hour before dusk.
Fifteen of the original thirty funiculars, the ascensores, still climb the hills, and most are protected as national monuments. The oldest, Ascensor Concepción, opened in 1883 and carries passengers from Calle Prat up to Cerro Concepción. Single rides cost a few hundred Chilean pesos. La Sebastiana, Pablo Neruda's hillside house on Cerro Florida, is open as a museum most days except Monday, with timed entry from the Fundación Pablo Neruda. The historic quarter is best walked downhill from the cerros to the port.