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Rang

Painted hills above the Pacific

Valparaíso

A Chilean port of steep hills, old funiculars, houses clad in painted iron and walls covered in murals.

View of the old part of Valparaíso
Photo: Draceane, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Valparaíso is hillside blue

Valparaíso is Chile's historic main port, built on dozens of steep hills around a bay. Before the Panama Canal opened in 1914 it was a major stop for ships rounding South America. Houses on the hills were clad in corrugated iron, some of it brought as ballast in ships, and painted in bright colours; the story goes that ship paint was used. Old funicular lifts carry people up from the flat strip by the harbour. Since the 1990s the city has also become known for street art, and stairways, walls and whole house fronts on hills such as Cerro Alegre are covered in murals. The poet Pablo Neruda kept a house here. The historic quarter is a World Heritage Site.

Hillside blue#3F7FC2Tin yellow#F2C230Tin red#C8342BTin green#4FA86FMural pink#E8708C

Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.

About this page

Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Valparaíso" on Wikipedia. If you know Valparaíso and we have it wrong, tell us.

More colour cities

All colour cities
🇮🇳 The Blue CityJodhpurOld-city houses washed in blue crowd the foot of Mehrangarh Fort, on the edge of the Thar Desert.🇮🇳 Town of mud-resist block printBagruA small town near Jaipur where the Chhipa community prints cotton by hand in indigo, black and red.🇮🇳 Prayer flags over a high desertLehStrings of five-coloured prayer flags and white stupas stand out against the brown mountains of Ladakh.🇵🇰 City of saints and blue tilesMultanBrick shrines of Sufi saints are banded with blue, turquoise and white tiles, a craft still alive in the city.🇰🇷 Busan's pastel hillsideGamcheonA steep neighbourhood of small box-like houses painted in pastels, turned into an art village in 2009.🇲🇦 The Blue PearlChefchaouenA mountain town in northern Morocco whose lanes, steps and doors are washed in many shades of blue.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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