Valparaíso was Chile's window on the world before the Panama Canal closed it in 1914. Three days trace that arc: the colonial ravine at La Matriz, the War of the Pacific crypt, the Protestant cemetery and the jail that held Pinochet's prisoners.
Chile's oldest port parish, founded on this exact spot in 1559; the current adobe-and-timber church is the fourth building (1842), its predecessors lost to earthquakes and the raids of Drake and Hawkins. Open daily 09:00–19:00.
Valparaíso's first square, laid out in 1810 where the colonial ravine met the shoreline before the bay was landfilled. Ringed by the 1893 Mercado Puerto and the 1896 Bar Inglés, it was the city's commercial heart until the 1906 quake.
Chile's second-oldest museum (1878) sits in the 1881 Palacio Lyon, one of the few structures to survive 1906 intact. Rooms cover the Chango coastal fishers, Aconcagua-culture pottery and the Humboldt Current's whaling era.
An 1842 hilltop house named for the Scottish admiral who built Chile's first navy — he never actually lived in it. Inside is a model-ship and colonial maritime collection; outside, the widest free panorama of the bay and the container port.
Housed in the 1893 Naval Academy on Cerro Artillería, thirteen halls trace the War of the Pacific (1879–83): Arturo Prat's sword, relics raised from the Esmeralda, and Cape Horn navigation charts. Tue–Sun 10:00–17:30.
The 1886 granite column on Plaza Sotomayor is also a crypt — Arturo Prat and the Esmeralda's dead lie beneath the paving. The Chilean Navy still mounts a guard here, opposite the 1910 Armada headquarters, formerly the city Intendencia.
A 1807 Spanish powder magazine became the public jail in 1906 and held political prisoners through the 1973–90 dictatorship. Turned into a cultural park in 2011, the surviving cell block, yard and gallows wall stay open Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
Ordered by Pinochet in 1988 and inaugurated in 1990, this brutalist complex moved Chile's legislature 120 km from Santiago — a deliberate break with the palace bombed in 1973. Free weekday visits with passport ID.
Opened in 1825 for Protestants barred from consecrated ground, the dissidents' cemetery holds the British, German and North American merchants who financed the port. Adjacent Cementerio N°1 has the mausoleums of Valparaíso's shipping dynasties.
Raised in 1858 for the British colony under a law forbidding a tower, a bell or a door onto the street — Chile's first legal non-Catholic church, hidden behind a plain garden wall. Its 1903 Forster & Andrews organ is still played.
An art-nouveau mansion of 1916 built for the saltpetre trader Ottorino Zanelli and bought in 1925 by Croatian nitrate baron Pascual Baburizza, whose European paintings became the city's fine arts museum. Tue–Sun 10:30–18:00.
The only vertical lift in the city, working since 1915: a 150-metre tunnel bored into the rock, then a wooden cage climbing 60 metres to a footbridge. It was built for the factory workers of the Almendral flats and restored in 2015.