The University of Valparaíso (UV) is a state public university in Chile, with its headquarters and the majority of its campuses in the city of Valparaíso. It has several other campuses in the Valparaiso Region of Chile (Quinta Región) and in Santiago, which is 100 km from Valparaiso.
Taking its current name as an autonomous university on February 12, 1981, UV is heir to the most longstanding higher education tradition in Valparaiso and its region.
As the major Pacific port south of San Francisco, Valparaiso was an important centre of business in the nineteenth century. Formal studies in law began there in 1878. By 1911, teaching had evolved into Chile’s first regional School of Law, part of the national University of Chile (UCH, which in turn can trace its origins back through two colonial universities to 1622, some 82 years after the Spanish began their colonisation of today’s central Chile).
