Valaparaiso

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Valparaiso is an amazing and unique city. Its built on lots of very steep hills (cerros) so has lots of little funicular lifts which are very old, but well maintained (at least the ones we went on). The next thing is that the cladding material of choice is corrugated iron sheet! So houses often look like an old shack with very grand doors and windows.
The next weird thing the colours used to paint the buildings - purple, bright green, yellow and so on.
Even weirder are the graffiti - more like murals than what we know as graffiti - just look at the photos!
There is an amazing mixture of rich and poor all jammed in together and an incredible variety of different building designs - from Californian modern to Spanish colonial. It seems to be a city devoted to self-expression! A glorious example of what happens when there are very few planning laws.

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