📍Casa de Isla Negra, El Quisco, Valparaíso, Chile
1939 – 1973“I grew up in Temuco, in Chile's rainy south, where my father drove a ballast train into the forests and I learned to love beetles, wet timber and the sound of rain drumming on tin roofs. In the late 1930s I bought a little stone cabin from an old Spanish sailor on the wild coast at Isla Negra, wanting a quiet place to write Canto General, and over the years I built it out into a house shaped like a ship — low ceilings, narrow passages, and rooms looking straight out at the Pacific. I gave some rooms zinc roofs so I could hear the rain as I had as a boy in Temuco. I filled the house with my collections: ships' figureheads, bottles, maps, ships in bottles and a whole room of shells I called Under the Sea. It was my favourite of all my homes, the place I came back to between journeys and exiles. Matilde and I rest together now on the headland in front of the house, facing the ocean, and the house is open as a museum by the Fundación Pablo Neruda.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today