The Puerto is the seed from which all of Valparaíso sprouted. The hills came later, climbed by elevators and clung to by tin-roofed houses, but the plan, the flat land at the water's edge, came first. Here stood the customs houses, the inns, the chandleries that supplied passing ships. The Iglesia de la Matriz, the city's oldest church, anchors the quarter's narrow lanes, its bell once the loudest sound for blocks. Cobblestones still rise and fall over ground that was, in places, reclaimed from the sea itself. To stand in the Puerto is to stand on the foundation of a port that international sailors once nicknamed Little San Francisco for its rough energy and its fortune-seeking crowds.

For generations the Mercado Puerto, built in 1924, was the neighborhood's stomach. Its iron-and-glass halls rose near the spot where Saavedra had landed centuries before, and after a 2002 restoration its arcades filled with seafood restaurants serving the morning's catch, congrio and machas and the cold white wine of the central valley. Then came the 2010 earthquake, one in a long line of quakes that have repeatedly remade this seismic coast. The market emptied. The shaking that has flattened churches and cracked facades here for centuries did not spare the Puerto's grandest civic room, and the loss was felt as a kind of grief for a place that had fed the neighborhood's working people.

Honesty about the Puerto means admitting its hard decades. When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, ships stopped rounding Cape Horn, and Valparaíso's golden age as the Pacific's leading commercial port drained away. The Puerto, closest to the docks, felt the decline most sharply. Businesses and families moved uphill or out of the city, and the quarter gained a reputation for crime and neglect. Yet people stayed. The neighborhood's brothels, bars, and boarding houses had always belonged to the men who worked the sea, and that gritty, lived-in character never fully faded even as the money left.

In 2003 UNESCO inscribed the historic seaport of Valparaíso as a World Heritage Site, an acknowledgment that this improvised, vertical, slightly chaotic city was an exceptional witness to the early globalization of trade. The recognition gave the Puerto new purpose. In 2016, under a program to revive the city's heritage neighborhoods, residents painted the facades of shops and historic buildings and threw a street festival of food and music. Renewal here has come in fits and starts rather than sweeping transformation, and the Puerto remains a neighborhood of contrasts: scaffolding beside ruin, a freshly painted wall beside a boarded window, the smell of frying fish drifting over stones laid before anyone alive can remember.

What sets the Puerto apart from Valparaíso's prettier postcard hills is that it never stopped being a port. The cranes and container stacks of the modern harbor crowd right up against the old neighborhood, and the rhythm of loading and unloading still sets the pace of the day. Plaza Echaurren, near where Saavedra first stepped ashore, remains a gathering point, ringed by old cafes and the comings and goings of dockside life. From here the hills rise in every direction, laced by the famous funicular elevators that have hauled residents up the slopes since the 1880s. The Puerto is the hinge where the flat working waterfront meets the vertical, painted city, the place where Valparaíso has always touched the sea.