Pablo Neruda - the poet and his home

The home of the poet perched on the black rocks of the Central Coast of Chile on the Pacific Coast. In a small village known for good surfing. He lived a full and interesting life - making friends with Pablo Picasso and with Ernest Hemingway. The movie "Il Postino" is based on his exciting life. More photos of his home Isla Negra.

"Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean Communist poet and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda.

Neruda wrote in a variety of styles such as erotically charged love poems as in his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language."[1] Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was the color of hope.

On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes.[2] During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic posts and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When a Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.[3]

Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet. Three days after being hospitalized, Neruda died of heart failure. Already a legend in life, Neruda's death reverberated around the world. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda's funeral into a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets." wikipedia

His home - Las Gaviatas (Sea Gulls). Found the location in 1937 while horseback riding in the region at the Cordoba estuary. Started the home in 1943 with a series of additions until March 1945. There were no paved roads in the region at that time so materials had to be delivered by ox cart forging the Cordova river.