Having the World’s Biggest Pool All to Ourselves

This week we accomplished one of the major goals of our trip through South America – to visit San Alfonso del Mar, home of the largest swimming pool in the world. Here’s the view from above:

And here’s the view from our balcony:

But first, we went to Valparaiso. If you’re traveling down the coast of Chile, a stop in Valparaiso is mandatory. Because of its deep water harbor, Valparaiso was a city of major importance in the 1800s as a stopover for ships traveling the Atlantic – Pacific route. Today it’s mainly known for its steep hills with brightly painted houses perched on the cliffs going down to the sea.

Basically, Valparaiso looks as if someone cut La Paz in half, put an ocean at the bottom of it, then went berserk in the exterior paint aisle at Home Depot. The only problem with Valparaiso is that there really isn’t much to do there. The city itself is the attraction; all the tourist spots suggested in the guidebooks are hilltops you can take pictures from.

So we did that, choosing as we normally do to see where the dead people are. Valparaiso’s main cemetery is on top of one of the hills overlooking the bay, giving great views of the city. We could also see one of the working “ascensors” that people can ride to avoid climbing the stairs.

That’s the other problem with Valpariaso: the obscene number of stairs. Follow me up this: Our hostel was on a hill on the edge of the “flat” central section of town. To get to our hostel, we had to climb two long, steep stretches of uneven stone steps through a narrow alley between two buildings. Once we reached the hostel, there was a flight of steps from the gate at street level to the lobby. From the lobby and kitchen area, there was another steep flight of steps up to an eating area, then another flight of steps up to our room. From our room, if we wanted to sit down and relax, there was one last, tight spiral stair up to the patio on the roof.

If the gods and Elisha Graves Otis had wanted us to climb that many steps, they wouldn’t have invented elevators.

A strong point in Valpraiso’s favor: it’s full of cats and a lot of them are friendly. Lea and I have been cat-deprived since leaving Atlanta. Here we got some much-needed kitty time.

After three slow days in Valparaiso, we hopped on a bus to the village of Algorrobo and from there took a taxi up the coast to the resort of San Alfonso del Mar, where we’d rented a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen, hot water and everything for two nights. Forty-eight hours of beach time, ahoy!

Sal Alfonoso del Mar isn’t a hotel. It’s a complex of eleven luxury apartment buildings facing the Largest Swimming Pool In the World (I can’t say that too many times). There are plenty of apartments for rent and in the off season a one-bedroom for two people goes for about $100 USD per night. That’s more than we’ve been paying for our other stays on this trip but less than a lot of hotels in the States with nowhere near this kind of view.

The thing about the off season is that everything is closed, including the big pool. When we were there, San Alfonso del Mar was a ghost town. In a complex that can house thousands and thousands of vacationers, we could count the number of other guests we saw each day on our fingers. Even the grocery stores nearby were only open on the weekend; we had to take a bus back into town to buy food and wine. Once we did that, though, we didn’t have to leave the resort at all. And we didn’t.

Now about that pool. I mentioned that it was closed, but the big pool isn’t for swimming anyway. Each apartment building has its own semi-circular swimming area extending out into the main pool and we could have gotten in that if we’d wanted to freeze our butts off. In late spring, the Chilean coast is still frigid. The big pool opens to the public on December 15, and it’s for sporting activities like kayaking, sailing, wind-surfing and dive training.

We were content merely to sit in the sun and look at it. On our first day we walked all the way around it, which took an hour. Aside from ourselves and a handful of other tourists, our only company was the cleaning staff and the crews working to scrub the pool clean before summer, which they did from slow-moving motorboats trailing very long suction hoses held aloft by small, inflatable buoys.

Our two days in San Alfonso del Mar were probably the quietest we’re going to have on our entire ten months around South America. I wish it had been warmer – even in the sun it was too cold to sit poolside due to the wind, so we spent a lot of time enjoying the view from our protected balcony. Nevertheless, it was definitely worth it to go, slow down, recharge, and watch the sunset over the ocean.

It occurred to me as we were leaving that even though we’ve got a month left in Chile and it’s a real skinny country, this may be the last we see of the Pacific. I don’t think the bay and fjords around Puerto Montt count as part of the open ocean, and when we get to Punta Arenas we’ll be on the Strait of Magellan, the frighteningly windy midwaters between the Pacific and Atlantic. So, adiós al Pacífico. I hope that when we finally reach the Atlantic it’s a little warmer.