Valparaiso is a city and commune in Chile located on the central coast of the mainland of the country.The city is home to the National Congress , the Commander in Chief of the Chilean Navy and other public services and state institutions of national character as the National Council for Culture and the Arts , the Undersecretary of Fisheries , the National Service Customs and the National Marine Fisheries Service .
Valparaiso is in the form of a large natural amphitheater, being located in a bay surrounded by hills , where he lives most of the population. between the foot of the hills and the sea is the plan of the city center administrative, commercial and financial, while the bordemar is occupied by the port .
Call Quintile by monkeys inhabiting the area, the bay where the city was visited by the Spanish Juan de Saavedra in 1536 and named in honor of its Valpara�so hometown . In 1544, Pedro de Valdivia appointed as Harbour Bay Santiago and slowly began to appear several facilities and buildings for port service without a formal foundation as a city.
After the country's independence , and the opening of free trade, Valpara�so became a strategic port for the shipping routes that crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific by the Strait of Magellan and immigrant Germans , French , Italians and mainly British , reached the city. mid nineteenth century, Valparaiso had become the main commercial and financial center of Chile, in April with the opening of several banks and the first stock exchange in the country. The boom came to an end in the early decades of the twentieth century, with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 and the rise of the port ofSan Antonio in 1920.
Although from the 1980 San Antonio became the main port of Chile in terms of port traffic, Valpara�so remains an important administrative, commercial, cultural and university, and in 2003 the UNESCO declared the old town City asCultural Heritage of Humanity