The Bad Girl invited me to Miraflores. The titular character in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel arrives there as a teenager claiming to be from Chile and sets the hearts of the local boys aflutter. Vargas Llosa describes the neighborhood as a kind of early 1950s dreamland, where affluent Peruvian kids listen to western music, flirt, smoke cigarettes, dance the mambos, behave awkwardly, and affect sophistication.
Just as the main character falls in love with The Bad Girl, so I fell in love with Miraflores, an upscale Lima neighborhood of that seems to have more bookstores per capita than any other place on earth except Cambridge, Massachusetts. I spent hours walking up and down Avenida Larco between Parque Kennedy and the Larcomar shopping plaza, where the avenue dead ends into the Pacific Ocean. That mile-long stretch has cafes, convenience stores, boutiques, a major theater (where a Spanish language version of Waiting for Godot was just opening), travel agencies, hotels and apartment towers.
The side streets are illuminated by beautiful murals, authorized and otherwise. As I’ve done in so many other places, I treated those streets as my museum.
The street itself makes its priorities clear. 60% of the space from building front to building front is apportioned to sidewalks, 5% to a bike lane, 10% to a bus lane, and only 25% to cars and trucks. There’s no parking on Avenida Larco, which further contributes to the pro-pedestrian feel. The streets are clean and traffic is slow and orderly. And everything works—from the street lights to the bike lane signals to the fountains and WiFi in the public parks.
I suspect this level of municipal attention to urban amenities doesn’t apply in all of Peru—or even in all of Lima. But Miraflores seemed to embdy the old slogan for Chicago: the city that works.
Judging by the number of newspapers, tabloids, and magazines I saw for sale, Peru has a lively media scene.
I saw people reading them everywhere.
Some travel authors sniff at Lima, referring to it as little more than an airport through which people pass en route to Cusco and Machu Piccuhu. “Dusty” and “arid” are the adjectives one traveler used. Don’t believe it. Miraflores is vibrant and blooming.
I stayed there for four days and began to imagine that I could very happily live there. Maybe someday….
Thank you for taking me with you. Only with my imagination, unfortunately