The Chilean Miami

I love traveling When friends that are living in other places want to start a conversation about what is the best club to hang out in Viña del Mar or what are the best beaches in our country, I’m always in the mood to give my personal opinion or any suggestion. The problem comes when they ask me to give tourist information about my home city. Why a problem? Due to its distant airport and unmanageable dirtiness my city is not the paradisiacal city that people have heard about.

It’s really sad and embarrassing when I have to talk about my city and I’m conscious that I don’t have anything good to say. Besides having good beaches, there is no more to mention to people who are planning to come and spend their vacation after a long period of hard work. But I should tell them what they are going to face the moment they arrive in Iquique. I have to mention the location of the airport which is so far away from the city and already make you feel uncomfortable because you have had a long tedious trip and in addition you will have to face another 45 kilometers to get into the city.
Once you are in the city, you can find the remarkable difference between Iquique and other cities with regards to the city itself: Walls full of graffiti, sidewalks that seem they haven’t been swept in years, dogs running around the streets spreading who knows what kind of diseases that are easily given to children and even adults. To make matter worse, people who come here are able to find an overpopulation of cars. This means that you can find junk cars forgotten or simply abandoned on streets where people walk around. I haven’t even mentioned the garbage thrown on the floor.

It’s difficult to find a guilty party for these uncomfortable situations, and maybe the authorities could have been working to avoid these kinds of problems a long time ago, but they still cannot find a real solution to this. I can say the only way to decrease the dirtiness in Iquique is trying to educate people about all the risk that has to do with garbage in general and not only as an aesthetic problem. Children can learn to throw the garbage in bins and even adults can still learn to acquire culture.
After coming to Iquique visitors never want to come back, because beside of having a long trip, it doesn’t satisfy what they wanted, to have a nice vacation in a real tourist city. Which implies to be clean and prepared to receive visitors from any part of the world?