Portillo ski/culture adventure: La Sebastiana and Valparaiso

We cruise the waterfront to the Valparaiso side of the bay and go right to La Sebastiana, Pablo Neruda's Valpariaso house. He loved this place, the view of the ocean and the 45 hills that the colorful houses are built upon. He searched for a few years for the right place to buy and eventually it presented itself. Partially built by a Spanish architect/builder named Sebastian, and high up on the hill, it commands a great view of the houses, ships and the ocean.

Because it was unfinished, it was especially suited to Neruda, who love to tinker with building and designing. It was a process that never ended for him. A living space was to be lived in and, because life is always changing, evolving; so should the space in which it takes place. If you read my post on La Chascona (prerequisite to this post) you can understand that this house is shown more as it truly was, because it did not suffer the ransacking and looting of the Pinochet regime. The ship theme still was present, but not so much in the building itself as in the artifacts with which it was furnished: nautical maps, ship's sinks, maidenheads, ships models...

Other items: a carousel horse from Paris mounted on a round section of floor as if the whole room was spinning;

the ever-important bar; Neruda's favorite chair, "The Cloud", from which he claimed he could see a certain woman on a certain rooftop sunbathing in the nude on a regular basis (this just made his friends hang around longer to see if they could get a glimpse...and they never did); his writing room, above all of course.

Leaving La Sebastiana, I noticed several plaques on the neighboring house with quotes from Federico Garcia Lorca,

Spanish poet and friend of Neruda's in the early days of the Spanish Civil War (in which Lorca was executed).

From La Sebastiana, we rolled down the hill and eventually dismounted the bus to walk through the streets