The Open-Air Museum and La Sebastiana
From Cerro Concepción it's a walk across through the winding upper streets to neighboring Cerro Bellavista, threading through the Museo a Cielo Abierto along the way — twenty murals painted directly onto retaining walls and stairways in 1991 and '92, the work of a roster of major Chilean artists including Roberto Matta, Nemesio Antúnez, and Mario Toral, organized by the painter Francisco Méndez as a revival of a student mural project first attempted in the late 1960s and shut down under the dictatorship. Some of the murals have faded or been vandalized over the decades, but enough survive to make the climb through Cerro Bellavista's stairways and passages worth the slower pace. At the top of the hill sits La Sebastiana, the house Pablo Neruda commissioned found for him — bought unfinished from a Spanish builder who'd meant the third floor as an aviary and never got to finish the rest. Neruda added an attic and filled the five narrow, stacked floors with the collected curiosities of a life spent traveling: ship figureheads, colored glass, an armchair he alone was allowed to sit in. The climb up the stairwell keeps opening onto more sea, more bay, more of Valparaíso's amphitheater of hills, until the top-floor study delivers the view Neruda built the whole house around — the one he watched the port's New Year's fireworks from on his last December in the city.
Evening: Back to Cerro Alegre
With the sightseeing done, it's a walk back to Cerro Alegre and the hotel — no fresh arrival to make, just a return to the hill the afternoon started on. The evening is free to settle in: a walk along Paseo Yugoslavo as the light drops, dinner somewhere with a view back over the bay, and an early night before the long push north to the coast tomorrow.