Museo a Cielo Abierto: Valparaíso's Open-Air Art Gallery

The Museo a Cielo Abierto, a pioneering initiative in Chile, is composed of 20 murals in various pictorial styles, located on the slopes of Cerro Bellavista in Valparaíso. Inaugurated in 1992, the museum features renowned artists, some of whom are world-famous, such as Roberto Matta and Mario Carreño.The museum's origins date back to 1969 when a group of students from the Art Institute of the Catholic University of Valparaíso (now PUCV), led by Professor Francisco Méndez Labbé, began painting large murals on the walls of houses and retaining walls of Cerro Bellavista. Between 1960 and 1973, they created about sixty murals in various places in the city.In early 1973, Nemesio Antúnez, then director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, proposed the idea of ​​inviting various painters to create murals with the idea of ​​making an artistic tour of the hills of Valparaíso.The paintings are distributed throughout a wide sector of this hill, forming an artistic park on a slope, complemented by viewpoints and stairs among the attractive heritage architecture of the surroundings.Mural 20 is a collective work painted by the students of the Art Institute and survived from the period 1969-1973. Among the works that form the official exhibition of the Open Sky Museum, some murals made by the residents themselves and some works painted with spray (graffiti) sneak through.To conserve and restore the works, the Taller de América Valparaíso a Cielo Abierto was created in 1994, directed by Pascual and employing students from various careers at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso.