A Full Private Tour of Valparaiso from Santiago

Overview

A private 7-8 hour tour of Valparaíso's labyrinthine, mural-covered hills, with a knowledgeable local guide and transportation from your Santiago hotel.

Valparaíso's hillside streets are covered in murals, but it's easy to miss the best of them without local knowledge. This private tour includes both a dedicated guide and hotel transportation, so you can focus on the UNESCO-listed city's street art and architecture rather than navigation. An optional add-on for a local winery visit can be arranged.

Highlights

• Valparaíso's Hillside Murals See the city's best street art with a guide who knows where to find it.
• Historic Funiculars Ride one of Valparaíso's century-old funiculars up the hillsides.
• UNESCO Old Town Walk the historic quarter recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

A private 7-8 hour tour of Valparaíso's labyrinthine, mural-covered hills, with a knowledgeable local guide and transportation from your Santiago hotel. Valparaíso's hillside streets are covered in murals, but it's easy to miss the best of them without local knowledge. This private tour includes both a dedicated guide and hotel transportation, so you can focus on the UNESCO-listed city's street art and architecture rather than navigation. An optional add-on for a local winery visit can be arranged.

Valparaíso's murals aren't official public art commissions — they grew out of real neglect. During the 1990s, economic decline and population loss left many buildings on the city's hillsides vacant, and artists began claiming blank walls with little pushback from absentee landlords or overstretched local authorities. When UNESCO inscribed Valparaíso's historic quarter as a World Heritage Site in 2003, it had an almost paradoxical effect: rather than freezing the city in amber, the designation drew more visitors and more attention to the informal art already covering the hills, and street art kept developing as a living, contemporary layer on top of a protected 19th-century backdrop rather than being painted over.

Most of the best-known murals cluster on two adjacent hills, Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, both part of the UNESCO-listed core. Cerro Alegre's Templeman Street and its connecting staircases are among the most photographed stretches of wall art in the city, while Cerro Concepción pairs its murals with rows of colorful Victorian-era houses along the Paseo Gervasoni and Paseo Atkinson, originally built by 19th-century British and German merchant families. Artists whose work regularly turns up on these walls include INTI, a Valparaíso-born muralist now known internationally for bold, symbol-heavy portraits, alongside the collective Un Kolor Distinto and local artist Caiozzama.

The funiculars that connect these hillside neighborhoods to the flat Lower Town are historic in their own right — about 30 were built between 1883 and 1916, and roughly 16 survive today, several still in regular daily use. The colorful house facades that frame all this street art have their own practical origin story: 19th-century settlers built with wood and corrugated iron under few building regulations, and when the iron began rusting in the sea air, painting it over became the cheapest fix — an accident of economy that turned into one of the world's largest open-air collections of color.