Leaving the cold South of Chile we were heading for the metropolitan area of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, which are two cities that have almost merged over the years. Valparaiso is a city of students and artists, build on a lot of beautiful hills, whereas Vina del Mar is more a tourist centre, but still nice. Both have their charm, no doubts, but we soon remembered that neither of us is a big-city-person and so we left after two days (even one half of each of these two we spent outside the cities).The surrounding areas are a mixture of tourist towns, epic beaches and industry zones with big carbon power plants and oil refineries. Chile is definitely the most developed South American country; however in this area you can experience the downside on wealth fare
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