Unmapped Gems
CityBest October – March

Valparaíso

A port city stacked up impossibly steep hills, its century-old funiculars and layered murals doing double duty as transit and public art.

Valparaíso is built up more than forty hills rising straight from the harbor, connected by funiculars — ascensores — running since the 1880s, some still on original equipment. Nearly every wall carries a mural, part planned public art and part decades of accumulated street painting, and wandering the cerros to find them is the main activity rather than a side effect of getting somewhere.

Valparaíso