Valparaíso’s cable cars link districts of great charm

Peter Neville-Hadley/Horizon Writers' Group
Valparaíso's already colorful neighborhoods are further brightened by extensive murals, some featuring the city's signature transport system.
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VALPARAÍSO, Chile — Santiago may be Chile’s capital but the country’s cultural center is Valparaíso, two hours and 72 miles northwest.

While Santiago is inward-looking and hemmed in by mountains, historically cosmopolitan Valparaíso is more open to the world, atop hills that form a natural amphitheater with vast views over the Pacific. Colorfully painted houses throng steep slopes and form the audience for a ballet of cranes unloading plump vessels stacked high with containers.

Settled by Spanish colonists around 1540 on a narrow strip of level seaside land, the city grew rapidly after Chile gained independence from Spain in 1810, sprawling up ever steeper slopes. The wealthy needed a convenient method to reach hillside mansions, and the poor to reach their shanties yet higher.

Toward the end of the 19th century a solution was found in the construction of ascensores (elevators) — funicular railways that still crawl up the often shockingly steep slopes.

Around half of the original 30 or so remain in use, zigzagging across hillsides and lacing the city together. They provide novel links in improvised walking routes that alternate between the city’s sea-level World Heritage-listed business center and high-level residential terraces with panoramic sea views.

Valparaíso was designated Santiago’s official port in 1544, and the city grew rich on exports of wheat and saltpeter, and on servicing vessels rounding Cape Horn. British and German immigrants founded substantial banks and trading companies and opened South America’s first stock exchange.

By the end of the 19th century, the city was one of the continent’s most important ports, and today it retains a well-planned grid of sober, self-important neoclassical buildings at sea level, while its residential districts stretch upward in relative disorder, with streets that wind up the hillsides or snake around contours.

A profusion of brightly painted houses tumbles prettily down the slopes, and the ascensores, whose stations and cars are often just as colorful, are often lost between them, their entrances hidden among the labyrinth of streets and stairways. Sometimes the stations teeter against the skyline as if about to plummet into the densely clustered buildings below. Open on one side, they sometimes resemble boathouses deposited on hilltops by a huge wave.

In Valparaíso, cerro is the word for both hill and district, and neighboring Cerro Concepción and Cerro Alegre, above the heart of the city and the docks, boast a cluster of ascensores. Here, steep Templeman and Almirante Montt streets are home to bohemian cafés and restaurants beloved by Valparaíso’s university students. Just east the upper station of the Ascensor Reina Victoria of 1902, named for the British queen, is a battered, yellow-painted shed of corrugated iron on an isolated high point reached by an elevated wooden walkway.

Inside is a heavy turnstile, but payment is at the lower station. The fare is a mere 20 cents, but then the distance to be traveled is only 130 feet, although at a hair-raising 57 degrees. An attendant slides back the door to a rickety, wood-lined metal cage holding a maximum of seven people, then closes and locks it.

Two cars on parallel cogged tracks are joined by hawsers that loop over large steel wheels at the upper station, and halfway through the rattling descent the partner car passes, looking like an improbable garden shed raised on slender scaffolding with a sharply angled base and tiny wheels.

The exit is to the beginnings of the well-preserved evidence of Valparaíso’s former prosperity, and the walk east along Cumming and Esmeralda is past the imposing frontages of banks and the statue-topped offices of El Mercurio, a newspaper in continuous publication since 1827.

The large banking halls are worth visiting even if you have no need to change money. Their original luxurious interiors of paneled wood, Carrara marble and stained glass are still intact.

Opened in 1883, the privately owned Ascensor Concepción is the oldest of them all. Its entrance is hidden down a narrow passage. It climbs swiftly twice as far back up the hillside, but at a more gentle 45 degrees, to where a wooden upper station gives on to a terrace with views down to slim gray warships of the Chilean navy at anchor.

Walking west, it’s easy to get lost among the winding streets, even with a map in hand, although that’s part of the pleasure. Up, down and sideways stretch rows of two- and three-story houses in pink, purple, lemon yellow or green, with equally gaudy bougainvillea and other pretty flowering shrubs spilling over garden walls. Artful murals on empty walls add further color. Some are playful, some political, and some even depict Valparaíso’s signature transportation.

The route takes the Pasaje Bavestrello, a staircase that climbs through an apartment building, passes between houses, crosses a bridge, climbs again and gives on to further streets whose steep, snaking turns force houses into unlikely waferlike shapes.

The Palacio Baburizza near the top of Ascensor El Peral is an art nouveau masterpiece of 1916 that would merit coming to see in its own right; all checkered panels, dancing figures in relief, ornate hanging lanterns and organic columns.

El Peral, dating to 1902, drops with a whoosh to where a short walk through the city’s administrative heart and past bustling markets and restaurants specializing in fresh fish leads to the Ascensor Artillería, where, money ready, you discover that payment is at the top for once. It was originally opened in 1894 to take students up to a naval college.

The car is large, the track visible through gaps in the floorboards, the slope gentle and the ride a relatively long cliffside 575 feet, giving generous views across the harbor throughout.

No two sources agree on the numbers of funiculars still operating in Valparaíso, and even local people seem unable to keep up with their closures, sometimes suggesting personal favorites that turned out to be closed. They may love their city’s icons, but they’re actually riding the minibuses that storm noisily up the steep slopes blowing clouds of black exhaust.

Ascensor Polanco, the only one that really is an elevator, remains open. A long dripping tunnel leads 460 feet straight into the hillside. At the tunnel’s end, the elevator climbs nearly 200 feet through a shaft and through a hilltop tower with a vaguely prisonlike look. It’s connected to the hillside by an aerial walkway with views across the cluttered sweep of the city back toward Artillería.

Approval for the first ascensor was given in 1877, but this novel solution to the city’s inconvenient geography arrived only just in time for Valparaíso’s decline. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 made many of the long and risky voyages round Cape Horn unnecessary. More freight crossed North America by rail and the new steamships preferred ports with easy access to coal.

Valparaíso is now officially recognized as the Cultural Capital of Chile, and much investment in renovation of its historic buildings is beginning to revive tourism.

As residents know only too well, life in Valparaíso has its ups and downs.

Peter Neville-Hadley is a writer in Canada.

When you go

Getting there

Several companies operate luxury buses from Santiago’s Alameda bus terminal with departures every few minutes for around $7.

The city sits on 42 hills. There are frequent minibus services as well as perhaps 12 working ascensores and taxis, but there’s no avoiding a steep climb or descent on foot from time to time.


Ascensores are typically 20 cents per journey, up to 60 cents for some privately operated routes such as Concepción. Children pay full price unless they’re small enough to sneak under or be carried easily through the turnstiles, in which case they travel for free.

Where to stay

It’s best to stay uphill in Cerros Alegre or Concepción, where evenings are surprisingly quiet, there’s a wide choice of restaurants and numerous hostels have opened to welcome the budget travelers who have been leading the return of tourism to Valparaíso.

Hostels are easily found online through and similar sites. Many are in historic buildings and have comfortable and well-furnished apartments as well as cheaper shared rooms, such as the highly recommended Luna Sonrisa ( whose helpful owner is also author of the Chile handbook (Footprint, $22.50) and generous with information for Valparaíso and beyond.

Apartments can be rented through sites such as www.apartmentrental- The Valparaíso official tourism site,, has a list of attractive upmarket boutique hotels in historic buildings.


Chilean travel:

Valparaíso tourism: Very informative and well-illustrated pages.

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