Neruda’s oceanfront houses to get tourist hype

Chilean authorities are trying to step up the tourist attractiveness of poet Pablo Neruda’s seafront houses in the central part of the country which meant to be a source of inspiration for the 1971 Literature Nobel prize winner.

The mayor of Quinta Region, Luis Guastavino, is behind this initiative that intends to turn Neruda’s house in Valparaiso –known as La Sebastiana- and his residence on Isla Negra into huge must-sees for tourists.

The idea is part of next year’s celebrations to mark the Chilean poet’s centennial birthday, a sensitive man whose life and works are linked to “all of Valparaiso, its sea, its woodlands and its people.”

Francisco Torres, chairman of the Neruda Foundation, hailed Quinta Region’s contribution to the project as very significant because the area treasures Neruda’s two most emblematic houses deeply rooted in outstanding periods of his literary creation.

One of the abovementioned houses is perched on the Florida de Valparaiso Peak and was named La Sebastiana after its builder Sebastian Collado, a Spanish citizen who didn’t complete the house, a reason why the premises remained uninhabited for long years.

At the time, Neruda wrote that his mansion couldn’t be “too high, nor too low. It must be solitary, but not too much solitude. Neighbors should be invisible. They are not to be seen, or heard. Original but comfortable. Winged but firm.”

These were the conditions the spendthrift house Mr. Collado built for him really had, a house that Neruda refurbished and reopened on Sept. 18, 1961, in a ceremony with Chilean flags and empanadas.

Neruda’s second house in Quinta Region is the one on Isla Negra, right at the beach bearing the same name and where he lived until his death on Sept. 23, 1973.

Neruda bought the Isla Negra house from a socialist Spaniard, a retired boat skipper who started building the house to move in there with his family. “Since the house was half-built, the poet could finish it to accommodate him,” Mr. Guastavino explained.

The mansion’s rooms feature the poet’s collections of bottles and many-shaped objects, the bow ratlines where the medusa is the queen of the sea, and the Heavenly Maria, the goddess of all these objects the poet picked and brought with him from different parts of the world.