When I came down with the flu in Santiago last year, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any type of respiratory trouble. It helped that I’d spent the pandemic in Far North Queensland, where nobody even wore a mask. Because of national border closures, quarantines, and distance, not a single case of Covid ever cropped up in my town. But now I lay for a week on a garish sofa in the big city, getting up only for tea and to glance at the wet washing that bloomed, dried, and disappeared from the banks of windows on the facing high-rise, my urban foliage.

“What the hell?” I thought. I’m not sure what that meant, but it was kind of a refrain. “What the hell?”

Three weeks after my recovery, I booked an Uber to the oceanside port of Valparaiso, population about 323,000. I write “booked an Uber” with apprehension, because in my decades of travel, I never before had booked an Uber. I’ve gone by bus, train, truck, freighter, ferry, canoe, trolley, motorbike, rickshaw, bicycle, or foot. I use taxis, generally between airports and towns. But now I was booking an Uber for a seventy-mile trip with a perhaps talkative driver. The ever-present fear of becoming a tourist rather than a traveler edged up and grinned blackly.

My driver was an informed and entertaining man, who intended one day to move his young family to Portugal, where they’d make cheese and wine. This was disappointing. I’d hoped he would be a bore, unlike the tales friends had related about great drivers.

We drove through wine country, and he told me about Carménère. I don’t think it’s a well-known story, except by the connoisseurs among you. The star is a Frenchman named Jean-Michel Boursiquot, probably the world’s most renowned ampelographer. This might not be saying much, since nobody knows what an ampelographer is, but I looked it up for you. It’s an expert in the study and classification of cultivated grape varieties.

In 1994, Boursiquot traveled to Chile for a symposium. A former student brought him to a vineyard where she worked, and showed him a new plot of Merlot. Boursiquot later recounted, “The vines didn’t look like Merlot: the young leaves at the shoot tips were very orange, the shape of the leaves wasn’t like Merlot’s.” The vines were flowering, and he wandered among them. “The stamens of Carménère’s flowers are a bit twisted, while other varieties’ are very straight. So it suddenly clicked…it actually was the first time I saw Carménère in a vineyard.”

This was his initial visit to Chile, and Carménère had virtually disappeared from the rest of the world. It got wiped out by the phylloxera insect that devastated France’s vineyards in the 1860s. When the vintners replanted, they chose other grapes, in part because Carménère is finicky. But cuttings from Bordeaux had previously been transplanted to Chile, where they thrived. The problem was people mistook it for Merlot, and nobody knew the truth for many decades, until Boursiquot came along. After that, Chilean wine enjoyed a boom, and why not? Almost nobody else in the world had Carménère.

I liked Valparaiso as soon as we arrived. It’s a port city built mostly on waves of hills or cerros that rise up from the Pacific oceanfront. A narrow plain contains the commercial structures in the city center and in several suburbs strung along the coast. Right behind this strip rise the hills, where most of the people live. Their houses and shops are jumbles of colorful boxes set amid steep stone stairways, ravines, and funiculars.

These neighborhoods have taken a beating from time and disasters, including five major earthquakes following the great quake of 1730 that destroyed the city. Still, the place teems with character. The Municipal Heritage Management Department has mostly kept the historic quarter architecturally true to its 19th century heyday as the leading Pacific seaport in South America.

The city’s golden age was from 1848 until the Panama Canal opened in 1914. It has long been a cosmopolitan place. Named after a Spanish town by conquistadors who arrived in 1546, it and the rest of Chile finally gained independence from Spain in 1818. A number of fine plazas were then constructed in Valparaiso, whose Neo-Classical buildings look more Southern European than South American. Immigrants from England, Spain, France, Italy, and Germany set up distinct communities in the hills during these decades of sea trade dominance.

In 2003, Valparaiso received a UNESCO listing as a World Heritage site. The wording of this designation is unsettling. UNESCO is proud of the city because it’s a wonderful example of “globalization in the 19th century.” Critics have pointed out that when world heritage sites become known as “global” cities, their increased value to tourists can spawn the usual development plans by politicians and private enterprise that end up degrading the place’s unique character.

In Valparaiso, the citizens have organized and fought back over the past quarter-century with petitions and public information campaigns. They stopped a residential development in the middle of a park. They killed a controversial mall project. Their successes are part of the global movement in recent years called new municipalism, which two Chilean scholars define as “radical democracy and community-based urban agendas.” I imagine in Valparaiso, as in most cities, there’s debate over what has been gained and lost.

I spent my two months there in a flat with a view that adjoined an old mansion in Cerro Alegre. That community and its neighbor Cerro Concepcion, which were largely planned and developed as a single place by German and English immigrants, are now the two most popular areas for tourists. At the end of my small cobbled street, a left turn led steeply down to a promenade fronted by an old church and a few restaurants. At a tiny oval park next to the church, people listened to street musicians or watched a puppet show, and you could stroll along a promenade lined with artists’ displays and gaze at the city and ocean below. A twisting stone staircase led to another cobbled street that descended farther to downtown.

If I turned the opposite way at the end of my street, a steep ascent brought me to a flat spot at a roundabout, where there were a couple more restaurants, a convenience store, and a bottle shop. From there I could stroll left or right through the neighborhoods, or go straight up into yet higher communities. I walked for hours and hours all over the place, as I do in cities, and what I enjoyed most were the shortcuts.

These were the stone stairways or escaleras that run away from streets up and down ravines to another neighborhood, sometimes to another hill, or for a direct route to sea level. They twist and turn, are walled in parts, and then a view opens to a house-choked vale and the sea beyond. The buildings along the steps are covered in murals, so that coming around a sharp corner, I’d be faced with something big and powerful, a rainbow fish with a woman’s head, or a blue man with a white snarl.

The lanes or paseos of these hill communities often lead to delight. They’re full of neighborhood shops and bakeries and outdoor cafes. Tourists wander among artists and performers in front of walls lined with murals, and then an escalera leads up to another level of novelty. For those not disposed to the climb, a number of funiculars or ascensors still function among the twenty-eight that were built in the 19th century. I meant to try one of them but never did. The prospect of riding in a box on a pulley up a hillside instead of climbing the stairs threatened to return me to the flu-ridden Santiago mantra, “What the hell?”

Anywhere you go that has become touristed (which is dang near everywhere), the enduring drama is in how local folks deal with it. If they mobilize, maybe this particular structure gets saved, while that one doesn’t make it. The park remains intact but the square is overbuilt. In Valparaiso’s historic quarter, lots of houses have been converted to restaurants, cafes, small goods stores, accommodation, and art galleries. The owners often live upstairs and work downstairs.

Academic studies and interviews have shown that the people of Valparaiso have experienced a loss of privacy and of community networks, while their property taxes have soared. In the showcase communities of Concepcion and Alegre, where I stayed, home values have gone up and urban services and equipment have improved. Yet many long-time residents of the heritage area find it economically difficult to keep their homes, and government help for them is virtually nonexistent. The subsidized renovations are selective. You don’t have to walk far to come upon multiple-family dwellings perched on the edges of cliffs that look as if they could collapse any moment, like an old barn in Idaho. There’s nothing new in such stark differences, and you don’t have to leave an American metropolis to see them.

The scholar who has done perhaps the most work on selective touristification in Valparaiso is César Cáceres-Seguel of the University of Viña del Mar, just six miles up the coast. In a 2024 paper in the Journal of Urban Affairs, he pointed out that a major effect of this process is displacement. “In cities configured from neoliberal urban policies, the UNESCO designation acts as a device that strengthens this dispossession.”

For a 2019 paper in the peer-reviewed Revista INVI, Cáceres-Seguel interviewed sixty residents of Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepcion. A woman named Marcela told him, “I remember seeing the first lost Americans about twenty years ago — occasionally, some French tourists would arrive to see Neruda’s house and wander around a bit. When Valparaiso was declared a World Heritage site in 2003, things really started to skyrocket, and let me tell you, the growth over the last ten years has been unstoppable.”

Someone said outside investors buy houses to develop them into tourism businesses, but they don’t live in Valparaiso. Someone else said the cost of living has gone up, driving local greengrocers and others out of business. Several people noted the skyrocketing property values are fine if you want to sell and move away. But for retirees who want to stay, the property taxes are killing them. “They raise your taxes, they squeeze you, they force you to sell,” said a woman named Aurora.

I was taken by the insights of a man named Luis. “The deli is being replaced by a restaurant, the bakery by a sushi place; if there ever was a neighborhood spirit, it was erased, and a new one was built out of these changes.” He pointed out that Cerro Alegre, his community, no longer had the authentic porteño (Valparaisan) spirit. “This whole ‘heritage’ thing is largely made up — the people who come here come for the ‘exotic’ — owing to that Latin experience of neighborhoods and houses built haphazardly by the sea — but this peculiar bohemian vibe is also largely invented.”

One reason I liked the sometimes crumbling stone escaleras is they’re authentic, and some of them take you to paseos that are definitely not touristic. A lady at the door of a tilting cottage called to me that I shouldn’t go down those steps. There were dangerous people along the way. I laughed and waved, and then, of course, I was a little nervous on the walk.

The sight of people living in poverty made me revisit as usual the insoluble question of what a relatively rich visitor might do to be helpful. Spend money is the easy answer, but it blanches in the light of these systemic inequalities that arise from touristification. It’s like should you not fly or drive because you then help to pollute the world? Should you stop traveling, because it transforms places into tourist traps that ruin the lives of locals? But we don’t stop, or at least I don’t. There aren’t many Greta Thunbergs among us, willing to take the slow boat to Manhattan. We’re more like Al Gore, bullish on conservation and living in the extra-large carbon footprint of Americans.

I rarely visit the must-see sites of a place nowadays, as I prefer to merely hang around for a few months, but in Valparaiso, I couldn’t resist a visit to Pablo Neruda’s house, La Sebastiana. Years ago I was struck by the poeticism of his Memoirs. I took the long walk to his home, now a museum, on Cerro Florida. Just inside the gate, on a chair under a sign marked, “Security Zone,” a cat slept. At the door, I got an earpiece and a recorder that took me through the five stories of the wooden structure, which rose straight up to a windowed top floor like a lighthouse. Here was the poet’s modest study, next to living and dining areas, with terrific views over the harbor. Encased and suspended above the dining room table, an embalmed scarlet ibis spread its black-tipped wings.

Neruda bought the house with his friends, sculptor Marie Martner and her husband, Dr. Francisco Velasco, who occupied the lower floors. According to the Neruda Foundation, shortly after the poet’s death in Santiago in 1973, Velasco came home to neighbors disturbed about something going on indoors. Somehow an eagle had gotten into his house, even though it was closed up. He let it out. Later, he wrote, “I immediately remembered that time when Pablo confessed that if there was another life, he would have liked to be an eagle.”

I have a Substack on writing, travel, and political satire. Visit it here.

Two Months on the Stairways of Valparaiso, the Colorful City in the Hills was originally published in Globetrotters on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.