The city of Valparaiso has an estimated population of 25,000 stray dogs. One of the reasons why they are so visible is the topography of the city itself: the hills where the people live converge on a plain which is the city’s service hub. The dogs’ territorial instinct brings them down from the hills to settle on the plain. The authorities have viewed this situation as a health hazard, and have applied cleansing regulations involving the removal of the dogs from the streets and their extermination, implementing a bylaw that fines people who feed animals in the streets.

The issue of stray dogs in the city is considered as an attack on the current tourist and socio-economic development of the city and its nomination as world heritage. Nevertheless, the authorities have failed to come up with a solution and the dogs have found their own means of survival in the city. In a silent alliance, particularly with shopkeepers, street vendors, the elderly, the homeless and members of the community who seek to help them, systems of habitability have been set up and superimposed over the big city. The reused plastic bottles and containers that are put out daily as drinking bowls for dogs, and the cardboard boxes used as makeshift beds or kennels in different parts of the city, are proof of this.

Furthermore, the gregarious nature of dogs and the choice they have made as the only species to integrate with man, as a compulsory environmental factor for their normal social structure, mean that they form stable groups or clans of dogs with their own social structure and system, in conditions that are neither wild nor domestic: in conditions that only emerge in the city. A city system, with its own urges and dynamics.