Walking through Chongqing is like playing a game of Tetris: the streets go up and down like pieces of a three-dimensional urban puzzle that defies conventional logic on how to move around a city. The alleys intertwine at impossible angles and neighborhoods cling to cliffs connected by roads that rise more than 20 floors high. Metro lines emerge from tunnels through the mountains, only to dive directly into the center of residential skyscrapers.
Locals explain that in Chongqing, you don't walk, in Chongqing you decipher; you play. This futuristic megacity in southwest China, often compared to the dystopian landscape of Blade Runner with its fog and neon lights, challenges gravity and orientation. Here, 32 million people live stacked in vertical neighborhoods built on gorges, steep hills, and river basins. It is a paradise for urban planners and architects attracted to the madness of huge multilevel constructions where the ground floor of a building can be on the tenth floor, depending on which side you enter from.
Explaining this last point by taking a walk through the central district of Jiefangbei: the pedestrian street we cross, which initially seems to be at ground level, ends in a walkway from where, on the sides, there is a 27-meter free fall abyss. If one continues, it reaches the ninth floor of a residential building from where another walkway leads straight to the first floor of a shopping center.
In the extremely uneven terrain of Chongqing, a metropolis with its own twisted dimension that does not develop horizontally like most, but in overlapping layers, one can take an elevator on the first floor and descend seven levels to reach ground level; or live on the 15th floor and walk straight out of the house to the street.
In the hotel where we spent the night, breakfast is brought to the room by a Star Wars-style R2D2 robot. But the instant coffee they serve is quite bad, so we decide to have it outside. The logic to exit suggests going down to the ground floor, where the reception should be. But there is only an endless staircase descending between more buildings. The reception is actually on the sixth floor, connecting to a large commercial avenue.
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We change the coffee plan for a milk tea prepared by a robot with pincers instead of hands inside a kind of booth in the middle of the street. While waiting for the drink, we try to figure out on Chinese Google Maps at what height exactly the nearest metro stop is. A local merchant helps with more precise directions: "At 150 meters, take some escalators to a bridge. Cross it and enter the first building on the right. The station is on the third floor."
Summer is probably not the best time of year to visit Chongqing. Extreme heat, plus humidity, are never good travel companions. Many residents vividly remember the hell they have experienced in recent summers. The city is built on hills along the Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world, which powers the hydroelectric plants throughout the western region of China, relying on dams to generate around 80% of its electricity. Several times, drought halved the water flows to the reservoirs, leading authorities to have to ration energy with nighttime blackouts in some neighborhoods.
"This summer we are heading down the same path with the heatwave. Luckily, we have a huge underground city that is a climatic oasis," explains Tang, a young publicist who will act as an impromptu guide through the catacombs of Chongqing, which is also a fascinating urban phenomenon underground. There are 1,600 air-raid shelters built during World War II that have been transformed into restaurants, cafes, shopping centers, and museums.
In the so-called Underground City, whether in August or winter, the ultimate culinary adventure, the star plan, is to go try the most popular food: the fiery ultra-spicy hotpots. Chongqing is located within the Sichuan province, the land of spice, of the fiery pepper with an unmistakable intoxicating smell, of dried chilies, ginger, and beef fat oil. The most charismatic underground spot to enjoy the tourist-dubbed "death soup" is a hotpot with a capacity for over 5,000 people occupying a long bunker that takes more than five minutes to cross.
On the sides, there are numerous tables topped with large pots embedded in the center, each filled with a bubbling red fire broth with floating chilies and Sichuan peppercorns (numbing the tongue) where thin slices of beef, tripe, tofu, fish balls, lotus root, mushrooms are dipped... "Beware of the spice, it goes straight to your head," reads one of the restaurant signs. The rice and chrysanthemum tea served at the tables are very helpful in soothing the heat.
Locals say that spicy food helps endure temperatures that some nights do not drop below 37 degrees. Nevertheless, the streets are overflowing in the city recently renowned by local media as the cyberpunk city. Chongqing is in vogue. Domestic visitors are the majority, but more and more foreign tourists are arriving at this place that has become a sensation on TikTok and Instagram (according to the Trip.com platform, international travelers grew by 115% in 2024 compared to the previous year), especially since one of the world's most popular streamers, the American IshowSpeed, who has nearly 40 million followers on YouTube and over 30 million on Instagram, passed through here in April.
Speed showed for many uninterrupted hours the splendor of China's modern infrastructure, technological innovation, and vibrant millennia-old culture during a carefully planned itinerary by the Chinese government's propaganda departments, immersed in a soft power campaign to sell the charms of the Asian superpower. Speed's journey started in Shanghai, but it was in Chongqing where he achieved his most-watched broadcasts.
The same happened to another influencer, Jackson Lu, who posted a video with over 37 million views on TikTok showing how a normal day starts by leaving his 18-story apartment without an elevator, going down to the ground floor, which is actually the 12th, crossing a bridge, and taking the metro, which passes through two residential buildings before reaching a popular square in the city center, located on the 22nd floor of an office building.
"The urban planning of this city seems like the work of a drunk god who has been placing pieces chaotically while ultimately giving meaning to a futuristic maze that is unique in the world," says Chen Hu, a local architect who explains that the city originated from an experiment by the Chinese government, which 30 years ago decided to unify and repopulate gigantic rural areas settled on incredibly steep hillsides and vertiginous valleys. Most experts describe it as the fastest urban revolution on the planet.
"Due to its location (at the intersection of the Yangtze and the Jialing River), this place was able to thrive as a commercial port at the end of the Qing dynasty. But in record time, many farming villages came together to become a powerful industrial and technological center that utilized vertical space because it was the only way to build in such a mountainous landscape, interconnecting infrastructure at different levels. That's why you can reach a square feeling like you're on low and flat ground. Instead, you lean over a railing and realize you're actually on the rooftop of a skyscraper," the architect continues.
Chongqing's development, considered by many in terms of area and population as the largest city in China, has its roots in its designation as one of the four municipalities in the country (along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin) under direct control of the State Council. In other words, it would be equivalent to a separate autonomous community in Spain, despite clear differences in political systems. Now, Chongqing is the country's fourth-largest economy, with a GDP that grew by 5.7% last year, above the national average, mainly thanks to its strong manufacturing sector.
After the copious hotpot and a nighttime stroll across one of the city's 20,000 bridges—specifically, one that connects the 22nd floor of two office blocks—with skyscraper lights and a drone display in the background, we take the subway back to the hotel. The elevated trains on Line 2 pass through one of the most viral tourist attractions, Liziba Station, which spans a gap between the sixth and eighth floors of a residential building.
From the subway, you can glimpse striking vertical gardens covering the facades and many of the more than two and a half million cameras constantly monitoring. Chongqing is one of the most video-surveilled cities in the world. China's Big Brother comes to mountain hikes, where cameras equipped with facial recognition technology are located even in the most remote corners.