The Land Captain's Treasures:
Pablo Neruda's legacy lives on through his three homes
Neruda’s love of the sea influenced much of his work.
By: Collin Curry, Elayne Smith
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Street art depictions of Neruda cover the walls leading up to La Chascona on either side of the street, Chucre Manzur.
La Chascona sits perched on the slopes of San Cristobal Hill overlooking the bustling Chilean capital city, Santiago. The small cluster of quirky buildings clinging to the side of the hill make up the third home of the Nobel Prize winning poet, Pablo Neruda. The first clues as to the occupant of the house come in the form of street art. Neruda’s face adorns the walls across from his former residence. As visitors make their way up the narrow sidewalk, they are greeted by several depictions of the deceased famous Chilean poet, diplomat and adulterer.
The street art portrayals of Neruda, which can be seen on walls throughout Chile, show the cultural impact the poet had in the country. A successful diplomat who even served in the Chilean senate for one term, Neruda was a good friend and strong supporter of Chile’s first democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Neruda is seen as a symbol of the political struggle following the military coup in 1973 that deposed Allende and established Augusto Pinochet as the dictatorial president of Chile. Neruda succumbed to cancer shortly after the coup, but many people maintain he died from a broken heart seeing his beloved country fall into dictatorship. He was seen as a political poet, known internationally for contributing to a literary boom in Latin America.
Neruda’s legacy today can be seen in the streets, through the hundreds of tourists that visit his homes and through the writers and artists still inspired by his work.
Now all three of Neruda’s homes, La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in the major port city of Valparaiso and his house in the small coastal town, Isla Negra, are run as museums by the Neruda foundation. Each house is extravagantly decorated to an almost comic extent. The foundation operates tours of each house to showcase Neruda’s work and his peculiar personality and tastes.
​Wire art decorates the window and doors of the Neruda Foundation entrance in the courtyard of La Chascona.
Neruda began work on La Chascona in 1953 for Matilde Urrutia, his secret lover at the time and eventual third wife. Neruda loved the sea. He collected charts, compasses, telescopes and other nautical navigation instruments, and referred to himself as a “Land Captain.” His love of everything nautical shines through in both the design and the décor of the house. Built around a courtyard garden and connected by paths and stairways, La Chascona’s structures were designed and decorated to resemble the different cabins of a ship, with low rounded ceilings, small doors and an abundance of exposed wood floors and paneling.
The tour of La Chascona begins in The Captain’s Bar and Comedor dining room. The bar was salvaged from a French ship and the walls are lined with paintings, trinkets and wooden figures that the poet collected during his extensive travels. The centerpiece of the dining room is the long wooden table that stands in the middle of the narrow room, topped with dishes and colored drinking glasses that Neruda says makes even water taste sweeter.
Visitors listen on audio devices that tell stories of how Neruda used to surprise dinner guests by jumping (many times in costume) out of the secret passage hidden in the hutch at the end of the long table.
​La Chascona is obscured by the many types of vegetation that fill the courtyards and hide the various structures that comprise the house.
The tour continues through the secret door and up a creaky, wooden, spiral staircase to Uruttia’s office and the guest bedroom. It is in these rooms that the visitors learn, how, following the coup, La Chascona was looted and ransacked by members of the military. After Neruda’s death, Urrutia took the guest bedroom as her own.
Next, visitors continue the tour in the second building that makes up the house. This structure was the original La Chascona. Built in secret for Urrutia, this portion of La Chascona houses a living room with a sweeping view of Santiago as well as Neruda and Urrutia’s bedroom. Like the previous stops on the tour, these rooms are filled with Neruda’s eclectic collection of treasures.
​ La Chascona, Pablo Neruda’s third house, sits perched on the slopes of San Cristobal Hill in the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago.
The tour leads visitors out into the courtyard again and up to the last stop, the third structure that comprises La Chascona. The building is made up of the Bar de Verano, Neruda’s summer bar, his library and the France Room. The France Room’s walls are adorned with more nautical maps and charts and the room holds all of the poet’s awards and medals, including his Nobel Prize for Literature.
La Chascona was important in the life of Pablo Neruda, but it was not his favorite home, due to its great distance from the sea. That distinction lies with the Casa de Isla Negra.
A stone bust of Neruda sits on the rocks below Casa de Isla Negra and gazes out toward the sea.
The design and decoration of Neruda’s Casa de Isla Negra is where the poet’s love for the sea is most prevalent. The words, “Regresé de mis viajes. Navegué construyendo la alegria” are carved into a beam above the entrance of Casa de Isla Negra. Roughly translated, the inscription says, “I have returned from my voyages. I built happiness while I was sailing.”
The rooms of Casa de Isla Negra are low-slung, with low curving ceilings and narrow corridors that evoke the feeling of being in a ship. The house is filled with his collections of model sailboats, ships in bottles, figureheads from ships, seashells, sperm whale teeth and even the horn of a narwhal. In the poet’s bedroom, the bed is placed perfectly so Neruda could look out at a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean and watch the sunset from his bed.
In one poem he wrote, “The Pacific Ocean fell off the map there was nowhere to put it. It was so large, disordered and blue that it did not fit anywhere. That is why they left it in front of my window.” Neruda also kept a telescope by his bed so he could scan the waves. Visitors to Casa de Isla Negra listen to a story on their audio guides about how Neruda was looking out at the sea through his telescope and spotted an old ship door floating atop the waves. He called it a gift from the sea and collected it when it reached the shore, adding it to his assortment of seafaring artifacts.
In the back of the Casa de Isla Negra, jutting out toward the sea lays Neruda and Urrutia’s tomb. The poet always wanted to be buried in Isla Negra by the sea. While he passed away in Santiago in 1973, his remains were eventually moved to Casa de Isla Negra in 1992 after the fall of the dictatorship.
An open-air bell tower stands outside of Casa de Isla Negra overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Neruda’s favorite home attracts tourists, but also fosters a writing community. Neruda was drawn to Isla Negra by the natural beauty of the area. The contrast of jagged rocks on the shore and rolling waves lapping the sand still attract and inspire writers today.
While Neruda’s Casa de Isla Negra grabs most people’s attention walking down the street, Poeta Neruda, just across the road, another house holds its own tale and poet.
Walking inside Casa del Arte is like walking into a museum for sale. Touristy trinkets line every wall and dangle from the ceiling. Colored seashell wind chimes, plastic magnets, fish clocks, wooden Neruda silhouettes, treasure chest jewelry boxes and other varieties of knickknacks cover every surface.
At first glance it seems like an explosion of souvenirs as in any large tourist shop, yet tucked away against a wall across from the register is a pile of thin books laid out neatly on a table. The books stand out from the gaggle of flashy objects that fill the small shop. These books were born from a printer nestled behind the check-out counter only 10 steps away from where Alfred Asís, the shop owner and resident poet, lounges until footsteps draw him to the register.
Asís writes novels, stories and poems then prints them and sells them in his shop. He has written 23 books and publishes them himself. He started writing when he was 15 years old and enamored with a classmate. Asís writes on love and the beauty of nature, not unlike much of Neruda’s work.
"I don't work with money," Asís says. "I work with faith and spirit and the soul. It's more important."
Asís took his last name as a pseudonym from the saint and poet Francisco de Asís. He grew up in Santiago, and after 20 years, decided to travel the country to experience and write about the vast array of Chile’s natural wonders.
After arriving in Isla Negra in the mid-2000s, he created his first anthology book, "A poem to Pablo Neruda." The book includes poems from 133 poets from 31 countries. The poems are dedications and letters to the departed Neruda. Asís says working with people from around the world, specifically children, inspired him and drove him to create larger anthology books with poems to not only Neruda, but other significant poets as well.
Asís says some people don’t see the value in poetry, but people like Neruda are proof that words can have a lasting impact.
"Many say there is nothing, but the vision of the poet is much more ample than that," Asís says. "He sees many things that have not even been gotten, I believe. More than imagination, it is a union of the soul with nature."
Living across from Neruda's house, Asís says he loves seeing the variety of people that filter into his shop who came to see the Chilean poet's favorite house. He admires the creativity and imagination Neruda uses in his writing and says he admires how the poet observed life, saying how excellent Neruda’s work is. Living across from such a famous address has given him the chance to be inspired, make a living and set aside time for his writing.
"It's fantastic, of course, because it's like the literary Mecca," Asís says. "It's part of local heritage as well as national and international heritage."
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Like Neruda’s Santiago home, La Chascona, Casa de Isla Negra is comprised of several structures. Archways connect two of the structures that make up the poet’s favorite home.
While he's feet away from the deceased poet's front steps, Asís admitted he hasn't read a lot of Neruda's work. In part, Asís explains he doesn't want his work to be influenced by Neruda's style, but also in part because of his lack of exposure to the poet before arriving in Isla Negra. Asís says while Neruda is an emblematic figure for Chile, as a poet he was more internationally than locally renowned.
Juan Reyes, a professor of English at the University of Alabama, echoes Asis’s sentiments. Reyes took university students to Chile on an English department faculty-led study abroad program for two years. During their month in Chile, students studied literature and human rights activism writing.
The English professor says he considers himself more of a fan than a critic of Neruda, and has always been around Neruda's writing as his step-dad and friends always had one of his books. He says he likes Neruda for the poet’s ability to elevate the ordinary in metaphors. Reyes says these metaphors leave such an impression that he needs a few moments to stop and absorb them.
"His comparisons just make you want to sit down and ingest them," Reyes says. "It's those sort of analogies that arrest me all the time; I love them."
He says while Neruda has now become a national symbol for Chile, the separation between the illiterate and literate population made Neruda inaccessible to many of the poet’s countrymen for a long time. Most of his fame seems to have come after the poet's death, and Reyes says the poet was glamorized because of the political struggles of the time. Often this glamorization and fame overshadowed his controversial personal life. Neruda had three wives and he cheated on each of them with the next wife.
"Neruda was kind of a jerk," Reyes says.
​Neruda wrote this inscription about his beloved sea on the beam of Casa de Isla Negra in chalk. Roughly translated it reads, “I have returned from my voyages. I built happiness while I was sailing.”
Looking at Neruda's personal life and his social attitude, Reyes says he fits the typical 20th century masculine writer profile similar to Ernest Hemingway, which is not necessarily a loveable character. Reyes says a large part of Neruda's legacy comes from the time period. Latin America experienced an explosion of culture and literature in the 20th century, Reyes says, as people came out of a literary silence to express themselves like they hadn't done before. He described these poets, including Neruda, as Latin America's Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"He was a Latin American figure more than a Chilean figure," Reyes says. "He was a much more complicated person than the political poet he is labeled as."
Reyes explains Neruda's international fame and importance by the accessibility of the writer’s work. The word choice and metaphors Neruda uses makes his work easy for people to translate, Reyes says, without losing the effect of the metaphor. This kind of accessibility made it possible for the Chilean poet's writings to reach people across the world.
"He's accessible in a way a lot of poets don't intentionally aim for," Reyes says. "Eventually his readership caught up to him."
Reyes has visited each of Neruda's houses on several occasions. Walking through the different houses, Reyes says it's almost too self-indulgent and he felt like the poet was trying too hard to impose a sense of presentation. He says he saw it as intentionally provocative and as if the poet had done everything with the intent to display that he was living in some sort of an artifact.
"It didn't seem like just a sincere attempt to capture the ordinary things around him, but it also seemed like he intended to make it into a museum," Reyes says. "I saw [the houses] as wonderful and beautiful, but I also saw them as decadent.
​ Neruda’s bedroom in La Sebastiana is on the fourth floor of the house and overlooks the city of Valparaiso and the Pacific Ocean.
Neruda’s second home, La Sebastiana, sits high on one of Valparaiso’s 45 hills. Unlike La Chascona and Casa de Isla Negra, La Sebastiana grew upwards instead of spreading outward. The house is five stories tall. This along with its location, perched high on one of the Chilean port city’s hills, means that La Sebastian offered Neruda spectacular views of his beloved sea.
The tour of La Sebastiana starts in the first floor entryway and spirals up through the remaining three floors. Again visitors are treated to interesting stories about the house and Neruda’s life while they peruse the poet’s collection of treasures.
The second floor opens to the original front entrance of the house, with an iron staircase spiraling past a fish mosaic. Two golden statues arch over the entrance to the rest of the house. The third floor opens to a circular living room and a contemporary fireplace Neruda designed himself. The circular floorboards in the living room create a track for a solitary merry-go-round horse Neruda bought. A few feet away from the fireplace, overlooking the city, rests the poet’s treasured arm chair and ottoman, still stained from the green ink he favored.
In La Sebastiana visitors can see everything from a taxidermy flamingo to antique furniture salvaged from ships to his first typewriter. One of La Sebastiana’s more unique pieces is a bathroom with a door that is very much see-through, as the wood was carved out in intricate designs that gave a full view of anything inside. Neruda thought it was hilarious and dared his guests to use it.
​A porthole window in La Sebastiana helps create the illusion of being at sea. Each of Neruda’s houses were designed to resemble a ship.
While his bedroom has a good view over the city, the room is modest compared to the views and grandeur of his other two bedrooms. The poet was known for taking afternoon naps and would often leave people waiting as he slept for a few hours.
The tour of La Sebastiana ends on the top floor in Neruda’s study. An English sink hangs from the wall across from his desk, never connected to any pipes. Maps and books decorate the study along with a variety of small trinkets from his travels.
These rooms in each of his homes, filled with plunder from the land captain’s voyages, capture the essence of Neruda’s life.
Poet, diplomat, lover of the sea, serial adulterer, eclectic collector, Neruda’s eccentric homes showcase and personify every aspect of the poet. Visitors can leave any one of his homes and feel as if they understand the peculiar poet a little better and see the inspiration for many of his works. If they make the pilgrimage to all three, visitors may even start to feel like they know Neruda.