Yesterday I walked almost all the way to the top of Cerro Yungay looking for graffiti. Starting from Hector Calvo I climbed down to Yerbas Buenas and then strolled up good old G. MacKenna taking pictures whenever I saw some interesting piece or tag, which was often, as is usual here. I am only presenting some of them in this post.

Instead of zig zagging up and down, left and right the streets and alleys and the stairway passages between them, I decided to carry on upwards as straight and as far as I could.

Towards the end the climb became really tough, because in the higher altitudes the steep hill streets became even steeper and almost unmanageable by cars, although the taxi colectivos seem to put on a low gear and step on the gas to brave as far as the asphalt and concrete ends and the dirt tracks start. When I encountered two children riding a mare followed by a very young foal on one of the dirt tracks, I concluded that this is where city ends and countryside begins.

As you climb, houses gradually give way to makeshift dwellings inhabited by families with lots of children, who might be poor, but they certainly have the most wonderful view over Valparaiso and Viña del Mar.

You might think such a low-income area would be covered in graffiti, but it wasn’t. The higher I climbed the fewer pieces I found until I only saw some poor tags or none at all. The pieces I found during my walk were all much lower down in busier places and attractions were a lot of both local people and tourists move about on foot. Maybe the difficult access (and possibly bad reputation?) with the obvious consequence of small audience partly explains certain graffiti-free zones of this city on high hills? If a neighbourhood is really hard to reach and attracts nobody, why drag a heavy rucksack full of cans all that way for such unlikely prospect of fame?