Some days in and around Santiago de Chili. March 2006

Back to Chile


Photos
► city&harbor
► pablo neruda
► the mountains
► the river
► the sea
► the spa
 

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda dies some months before Allende is murdered. He still is the national poet, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature as was Gabriela Mistral years earlier. In his memoirs he writes ‘Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest doesn’t know this planet.’ He is right, he is not right. He is Pablo Neruda. Read his poems. We visit his house at Isla Negra, it is a house at the beach, it is not an island. Black boulders and rocks rinsed by the surf. Far off two appartments. He collected ships in bottles,ugly glassware and - as an old man - a portrait of an ugly woman. He loved the sea, the ocean. Waves are unique the way they heave and die out. The people still know his name, his verses by heart. The bell near his grave doesn’t toll anymore.