After all the wine tasting and then more wine in the evening I had a little bit of a fuzzy head this morning.

Despite that I got up to do the ‘off the beaten track’ walking tour around Valparaiso.

Valparaiso is a really pretty port town with loads of street art and colourful houses. The bottom part of the town is flat but the hills surrounding the town are pretty steep and my B&B is up one of the hills!

The walking tour started at Plaza Sotomayor which is one of the many squares in Valparaiso. The town was never officially founded so it doesn’t actually have a main square.

We then caught a local bus to take us up into the hills to Plaza Bismark. A lovely guy called Ollie played my bus fare as I didn’t have any small change on me.

This area shows the influence of the Germans who came to Valpo and is along a street called ‘Alemania’ street. The views from here are really good down to the port but it was a little bit foggy when we were there.

Valpo has a lot of European influence from Germany, Britain and Italy.

The next stop was the old prison which is at the top of the town. Prisoners used to be tortured here and local residents could hear them screaming. At one point a prisoner was placed in the wrong category section of the prison and was killed by other inmates. This drew media attention to the prison so prisoners were then taken out to sea and tortured at sea rather than at the actual prison. Now the old prison is a cultural centre – with the aim of bringing happiness and joy to what was once a very sad place.

Near the prison there is an old water tank which contains some original murals and street art. At one point, during the dictatorship years, many of the original murals and graffiti were painted over.

We then walked downhill to another small square called ‘the resting place’. In previous years the poorer people were buried in a couple of cemeteries at the top of the hills, whereas the richer people were buried in a cemetery in the flater part of town. So the poor people used to have the mass in the churches in the flat part of town and then have to carry the coffin up the steep hills to the cemetery. So they used to rest for a while at this square to get their breath back.

We continued downhill to another square where we caught a tram to the offices of the tour company. These offices are in a gorgeous 18th century building which still has most of the original features.

I met some other English speaking people on the tour so we all had lunch together at the fire station.

We then did our own tour to look at some of the street art and to go and see the famous piano steps.

I left the girls here and took the funnicular back to the bottom of town.

I had a browse of the shops and went to Victoria square, named after queen Victoria, and visited the cathedral.

On the way back I took more photos of the street art.

There a couple of artists who have painted four huge murals across the city depicting the four seasons. This one below is of summer.

In the evening I met up with Emily from the USA who had just arrived at the B&B, and also Jerry, for dinner. We had some delicious local dishes – mine was a type of mushroom bake.