President Michelle Bachelet vowed Tuesday to reconstruct this once-beautiful port city according to a master plan that would prevent many of the 11,000 victims of devastating wildfires from rebuilding on hills that cannot be protected from disasters.
The fires that started Saturday and leaped from hilltop to densely populated hilltop have been contained but not extinguished. Every stiff wind threatens to lift burning embers, putting more neighborhoods at risk. The fires already have consumed as many as 3,000 homes and killed 15 people while injuring hundreds more.
“We think this is a tremendous tragedy, but … it is also a tremendous opportunity to do things right,” Bachelet said in an interview with El Diario de Cooperativa. “What we’re looking at in terms of reconstruction is how to rebuild in a more orderly manner, better and more worthy” of Valparaiso’s status as a World Heritage City.
UNESCO granted the city that honor in large part because of its unique architecture, laid out on narrow, curving streets that climb hills so steep that many people commute by climbing stairways or riding cable cars. Brightly painted, improvised wooden houses hug forested hills and ravines, which form a natural amphitheater around Chile’s second-largest port.
While the city is often blanketed by fog from the Pacific Ocean, it has been plagued throughout history by wildfires that can spread quickly when the wind blows out to sea. Indigenous Changos who lived there before the Spanish conquest called the area “Alimapu,” which means “land destroyed by fire,” said Orion Aramayo, an urban planning expert at Valparaiso’s Catholic University.
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