Historic Quarter of the Seaport City of Valparaíso

The bay of Valparaíso was reached by Juan de Saavedra in 1536, and Pedro de Valdivia founded a settlement there in 1544. It was named the country's first port in 1554, and by the end of the 16th century a road linked it to Santiago. After a disastrous earthquake in 1730 the inhabitants were forced up onto the hillsides, and from then on most of the town grew over the hills, which gave Valparaíso its character.

After Chile's independence in 1810, Valparaíso soon became the most important harbour on the Pacific coast, trading directly with Europe and the United States. It became the capital of its province in 1842, and immigrants from England, France, Germany and the United States arrived to run its shipping and commerce. A railway to Santiago opened in 1852, and between 1847 and 1870 the town took shape as a commercial and financial centre. The hill districts of Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción were largely laid out by German and English immigrants, and much of their building material came over as ships' ballast.

To climb the steep slopes the city built as many as 30 funiculars, known as elevators; the oldest, the Concepción, opened in 1883. A violent earthquake in 1906 led to large reconstruction programmes. But the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 left Valparaíso off the main routes between the oceans, and the saltpetre crisis and the slump of 1929 deepened its decline. The lack of development that followed preserved its 19th-century fabric, and the historic quarter was inscribed in 2003.