Viña del Mar

Before the Spanish arrived, the valley of the Marga Marga was known as Peuco to the Changos, the fishing people of this coast. After the conquest the land was split into large haciendas, and in 1580 Alonso de Riberos planted the first vineyards in the basin. The vines stood opposite the road from the port of Valparaíso to the Quillota valley and came to be called the Viña de la Mar, "the vineyard by the sea", a name that passed to the whole valley. A storm destroyed the vineyards in 1827.

The modern city began with the railway between Santiago and Valparaíso, which crossed the hacienda of Francisco Javier Alvares. A young engineer working on it, José Francisco Vergara, married Alvares's granddaughter Mercedes, and the couple laid out a new town on her inheritance, founded on 28 December 1874. The Viña del Mar sugar refinery, opened in 1873, and the British firm Lever, Murphy & Co., founded in 1883, gave it industry, while wealthy families built mansions and castles such as Wulff Castle and Brunet Castle. The casino opened on 31 December 1930, the presidential summer palace on Cerro Castillo in 1931, and Viña del Mar became Chile's leading international resort; it hosted matches at the 1962 World Cup.

The economic crisis of the early 1980s closed the sugar refinery and the textile mills, two of the largest employers, and unemployment soared. Tourism and later the copper boom brought recovery, and Concón, merged into the city in 1927, became a separate commune again in 1995. The 2010 earthquake damaged the city, and in February 2024 wildfires in the hills of Viña del Mar and Quilpué, which killed 131 people in total, affected at least 14,000 homes and destroyed the city's botanical garden, founded in 1931.

Viña del Mar's name is known across the Spanish-speaking world because of its song festival, held every February since 1960 in the amphitheatre of the Quinta Vergara. What began as a contest for popular and folk songs has become six nights of headline concerts by Latin pop, ballad, rock and reggaeton stars, with comedians between the acts, broadcast live across the Americas. The city is crowded for the festival week. The Viña del Mar International Film Festival is among the most important in Latin America, and the Municipal Theatre has stood on the city's main square since 1925.

The British who ran the port and its businesses left a lasting mark on local sport. The Valparaiso Sporting Club, founded in 1882, has held the Chilean Derby since 1885 and played host to cricket, golf, polo and the first international football match in Chile; schools such as the Mackay School, of Scottish origin, still run rugby sevens tournaments each summer. Everton, founded in 1909 by Anglo-Chilean teenagers and named after the English club, carries the nickname Ruleteros, "roulette players", for the city's casino, and its matches against Santiago Wanderers of Valparaíso are the local derby.

The singer Mon Laferte and the writer María Luisa Bombal were born here, and the Fonck Museum and the fine arts museum in the Vergara Palace keep the city's collections.

About 335,000 people lived in the commune at the 2024 census, making it the most populous in the Valparaíso Region, and Greater Valparaíso — Viña del Mar with Valparaíso, Concón, Quilpué and Villa Alemana — had about 935,000 in 2017. The flat plan by the sea holds the oldest streets, the shops and services and a better-off residential area, but more than four-fifths of the population lives on the hills around it, mostly in middle- and lower-middle-income neighbourhoods; Recreo and Reñaca are the exceptions, home mainly to middle- and upper-income households.

Tourism is the base of the economy, and the city has a wide range of hotels, though the casino has lost much of its income since a national gambling law brought new competition from casinos elsewhere in Chile. Large shopping malls now stand on Avenida Benidorm, once an abandoned industrial zone, and the El Salto district is the industrial area. Several universities, the navy's academies and hospitals, and commuters working in Valparaíso shape the weekday rhythm. In summer the population swells with holidaymakers from Santiago and Argentina.

The rebuilding of the hillside districts burned in 2024 is a major local issue. Macarena Ripamonti of the Broad Front has been mayor since 2021.

The coast shapes the menu. Seafood restaurants line the Camino Costero, the coast road to Concón, where machas a la parmesana — Chilean surf clams baked with Parmesan — and fried fish are typical dishes. Empanadas, many filled with seafood, are sold all along the coast, and the chorrillana, a platter of chips heaped with strips of beef and fried onion, popularly said to come from neighbouring Valparaíso, is shared in bars on both sides of the city limit.

Viña del Mar has a sweet tooth of its own. The alfajor, a biscuit sandwich filled with manjar, the Chilean caramel, or with fruit, and often coated in chocolate, is a very popular treat in the resort.

Eating out is concentrated in the plan, where many bars and restaurants have opened around Plaza México and along Avenida San Martín, serving Chilean and international food. White wine comes from the nearby Casablanca valley, known for Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay.