Sparks Flew from the Hooves of a Carthorse

My house in Chile was only a fifteen-minute walk from the beach—a novelty for me. In the United States I live six hours from the nearest coast. One afternoon, while walking to the beach, I saw a horse, which was pulling a carriage, trip in the street in front of me. As he regained a normal stride, his metal shoes struck the asphalt, throwing sparks. And it struck me at the moment, as these things sometimes do, that this is a perfect way to describe this area—Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, especially Valpo, as the language-saving Chileans call it, a city that mixes a combination of old and new with a spark of the unexpected.

Yo viví en Viña, I lived in Viña, but I had classes in both cities so I spent time in both. Valparaiso is a strange city full of culture where hundred-year-old buildings stand side by side with modern department stores. The grandeur of many of the older buildings is somewhat dulled by their age, and many appear to need renovation. The juxtaposition of old and new is just amazing, and the city reminds me of a skinny carthorse pulling a carriage down a street full of cars. The Paris department store and the huge Jumbo supermarket are just a few blocks from the older open-air market where the vendors yell their prices to the passerby, assuring their possible customers of quality and freshness at a good price. One of the University of Valparaiso’s main buildings, nearly ninety years old, stands across the street from the bright and shiny Paris store.

As you move out of the downtown area, near the ocean, you enter the more residential area in the surrounding hills. These houses climb up the hills, stacked one on top of the other and painted a rainbow of different colors. Only a few strips of vegetation reach down between them like fingers, places likely too steep to easily build anything. The higher up on the hill, the poorer the area, and it’s here that you can find the most rickety and creatively constructed houses. A professor of mine mentioned that some of the highest neighborhoods don’t even have running water; it has to be trucked up from below.

Many people don’t walk up the steep hills to reach these high-altitude neighborhoods; instead they use a number of different ascensores or elevators. These wooden boxes on tracks, always two, one up and one down, traverse the hills. Some of them don’t work anymore—the parts are expensive and difficult to find because of their age. Some of these rickety contraptions are nearly a hundred years old, and they look it. I went up into the hills a number of times in order to explore the city and sometimes would take one of the ascensores, though you can take the stairs as well—never-ending stairs.

You enter the wooden cabin of the ascensor and sit down, usually on one of the benches that line the sides of the cabin. Then you wait for the attendant to close the door and to start the machine. The motors grumble to life and shakily the ascensor slowly moves along the tracks. This service is provided for a small fee, of course—few things are free here. Everyone wants a tip and a frequently seen sign reads, “Tu propina es mi sueldo,” or your tip is my salary. However, you do find more generous people as well like the market vendor who gave me and a friend two peaches the other day as we walked through one of the markets.

This old, somewhat-dilapidated city still has many things that give it its spark. There are splashes of color everywhere: the amazing graffiti, works of art in their own right, which covers many walls in the city and can be found in some of the most unexpected and hard-to-reach areas. The extreme sweetness of the best fruit you have ever eaten. The peeling paint and somewhat disconcerting creaks of the hundred-year-old ascensor as it wobbles its way slowly up or down the hill. The constant cries of the seagulls that sound like asylum escapees laughing and cackling at some inside joke. The twisting streets of Valparaiso that almost always go up. The micro drivers who completely disregard the speed limit of 60 kph and leave you to hold on tight. The stray dogs of every shape, size, and color imaginable—I want to take them all home with me. The port with its gigantic cranes that load containers onto equally gigantic tankers. The tankers afloat in the ocean waiting patiently to unload their cargo from the four corners of the earth. The amazing views of the sea seen from high up in the hills—nothing but blue. These are sparks indeed, enough so that the city burns with its own unique fire, making it unforgettable.

January 21, 2009