Valparaiso

With an amphitheater, Valparaiso mix past and present, along with a wide and beautiful bay, surrounded by a chain of high hills, which climb to its summit, streets, alleys, passages, stairs and funicular. Between the foothills and the sea is a narrow strip of streets, site of trade, financial centers, offices in old houses and modern buildings.

Much of the sea border is occupied by the port: Molos, docks, jetty berths and container storage yards, but there are also several places where you can access the sea beaches, lookouts and rock.

Always a tour of Valparaiso is a pleasant experience, as a port city life adds an unusual architecture and an unusual layout of streets. Emulating the art on a rugged and steep nature has deployed a clever urban design that combines the practical and picturesque that make this city one of the most original in the world.

Like most of the ports of Spanish America, Valparaíso lacks a record of founding and growing in no particular order. During the summers of the XVI and XVII, the boats came from Callao to the bay and the city is filled with activity, which decayed the rest of the year.

The quality of Port, "for the treatment of these lands and the city of Santiago," was made official by the conqueror of Chile, Pedro de Valdivia in 1542. In 1599 a chapel was built where today stands the Church of the Matrix. Slowly rise houses, a church and a fort on the Castle of San Jose, Cerro Cordillera, on the current Calle Serrano.

From Independence to the early nineteenth century, Chile and America join the world trade. Valparaiso is a strategic port for routes around the Cape Horn come from the Atlantic to the shores and islands of the Pacific generated the boom in the city in its cellars kept the goods subsequently re-embarked to other ports in the Pacific and Oceania.

English, German and French are installed in Valparaiso to handle their import trade, also brought capital to develop the mining of copper, silver and nitrates, as well as major public works of the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, the city became the main financial and commercial center of Chile, creating the first banks and stock exchange members to host a new social class emerging from the mineral wealth, large houses, where some still survive.

In Chile, Valparaiso was a pioneer in many areas: the first trams, the first electrical wiring for streetlights and home, first telephone, first laying of gas pipe. From here begins the construction of the railroad to the capital Santiago, the capital. Same with the telephone and telegraph.

Between 1914 and 1930 there are situations that change the fate of the country's main port. Opens transforming the Panama Canal on arrival terminal and no passing away, all new internal government policies of industrialization lead to the commercial and financial headquarters to move to Santiago, closer to the political power.

At the beginning of XXI century, Valparaíso is a commercial, administrative, academic and labor of a vast region, also known as Gran Valparaíso, which also includes the towns of Viña del Mar, Con Con, Quintero, Quilpué, Villa Alemana and Limache.