Valparaíso is South America's cheapest great walking city: the murals are on public stairways, the best viewpoints charge nothing, and the funiculars still cost CLP 100. Three days here run on market lunches, fried fish at the caleta and shoe leather.
Twenty concrete mural panels painted 1969-1973 by Chilean masters including Roberto Matta and Nemesio Antúnez, set directly into the stairways and retaining walls of Cerro Bellavista. Unfenced, unstaffed, open around the clock.
Chile's second-oldest natural history museum occupies the 1881 Palacio Lyon at Condell 1546: mounted Humboldt-current fauna, a full whale skeleton and Selk'nam and Rapa Nui artefacts. Tuesday-Saturday 10:00-17:30, Sunday to 17:00.
A 1807 powder magazine that became a political prison and is now a public arts campus. Free galleries in the old cell block, dance studios visible through glass, and a wide grass esplanade looking straight down onto the bay.
Two hillside cemeteries from 1825 where British, German and Scandinavian sailors lie under cypresses beside marble Chilean mausoleums cracked by the 1906 earthquake. Terraced paths give an unbroken view over El Plan and the cranes.
The city's working produce market since 1912. Ground floor is fruit, seaweed and merkén; the upper gallery holds a dozen family cocinerías serving cazuela, pescado frito and paila marina to porters from 08:00.
A takeaway window on the Cerro Alegre climb turning out baked empanadas at roughly CLP 2.000-2.800 each — camarón queso, champiñón queso and pino. Two of them plus a soda is a full lunch under CLP 6.000, eaten on the kerb.
The 1922 fish market, reopened after restoration, anchors the oldest square in Valparaíso. Around it sit century-old sailor bars like Bar Liberty and Bar Inglés where a menú del día — soup, main, drink — still costs well under CLP 8.000.
Working landing stage between Valparaíso and Viña where boats unload conger eel and reineta each afternoon. Upstairs cocinerías fry the day's catch with salad and bread for a fraction of Cerro Alegre restaurant prices, pelicans included.
The widest free panorama in the city: the whole port, breakwater and container terminal laid out below a shaded promenade, with a small handicraft feria and the naval museum grounds behind. Reachable entirely on foot by the Artillería stairs.
The only vertical lift in the city: a tunnel drilled into the rock leads to a wooden cabin that rises 60 m up a free-standing shaft, roughly CLP 500 a ride. The surrounding cerro is covered in the annual Polanco mural festival works.
The 1906 lift off Avenida Argentina still runs on its original German machinery and delivers you beside the Iglesia San Francisco bell tower, the landmark sailors used to sight the port. The terrace looks east over the whole bay curve.
Walk the free public pier past the fish stalls and navy launches, then cross to the cobbled square with its 1886 monument and sunken archaeological window. Sunset turns the tugs and the Armada building copper-coloured at no charge.