Who Needs Clubs When Everyone Is at the Cafe? [Featured]

The New York Times recently ran this article about Lima’s cafe and restaurant scene, featuring Gastón Acurio’s La Mar, Sonia’s, and trendy Barranco’s most popular haunts. The first part can be read here

April 24, 2009 | Peruvian Food

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Miradas de Barranco

The sights and sounds of bohemian Barranco in southern Lima are captured beautifully in this video below. Among the ageing colourful buildings, children play, street sellers sell, diners dine and people generally go about their business unaware that they are being observed from afar.

February 24, 2009 | Lima City Guide

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Destruction of Lima’s architectural heritage [Featured]

Lima grows ever higher. In districts like Miraflores, Chorrillos, Barranco and San Isidro are loosing more and more of of their traditional homes, the majority of which built in the early 1900s. They are forced to make way for grand towers and modern apartments that ignore the style of the surrounding area and simply don’t fit. Worse still many defy urban-planning rules implemented by local municipalities.

August 19, 2008 | Culture & History, Lima City Guide

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Tio Mario

It has been 20 years since a cart selling anticuchos appeared on the streets of the district of Barranco. Every afternoon Mario Farfán and his wife would sell their anticuchos to passers-by eventually saving enough money to open what is today one of the best anticucherías in Barranco. Mario’s cart has been exchanged for a large restaurant in a prime location overlooking the Bridge of the Sighs which he was able to buy for $160,000 US.

July 2, 2007 | Lima City Guide, Peruvian Food

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Barranco – Slope of the Baths

The history of Barranco is here, but what I neglected to mention was the most important part. It’s not important for what happened there and no Chileans destroyed it. It’s important because it’s the natural feature for which the town was named. This natural feature is a ravine that is cut into the cliff and runs down to the beaches below.

March 9, 2007 | Lima City Guide

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Barranco

Not far from the village of Surco and some way from the city of Lima was the fishing village of Barranco. Time passed and Barranco became a small town popular with Lima’s elite – many of whom decided to build large lavish houses there.

For a while Barranco was named the City of Windmills as each home in the area had a windmill on its property to pump water from wells. More time passed and Barranco became a popular seaside resort coping with an influx of rich Limeños and foreigners building country homes there. Many of the foreigners at this time, around the late 1700’s, were British and German. Still, despite increased development into the 1800’s the town was an calm oasis in the desert, with sufficient supplies of water and trees to be seen everywhere. It was peaceful – but not for long.

March 6, 2007 | Lima City Guide

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Barranco – Iglesia de la Ermita

Barranco, long since swallowed up by the huge city of Lima, was once a tiny distant fishing village. Legend has it that one winter, while out fishing, a group of fishermen were lost in Lima’s legendary sea mist. After praying and searching in vain for hours in the darkness they noticed a glittering light in the distance. Rowing towards it, they ran ashore and were saved. They climbed the cliff to where they had seen the light and found nothing but a wooden cross in the sand.
It was here, as the legend goes, they built the Church of La Ermita, where it still stands to this day.

March 5, 2007 | Lima City Guide

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