Fine dining
leading new designs

With the international recognition of Peruvian cuisine in the 2000s and the rediscovery of local coffee, a new generation of ceramicists, architects, and designers emerged.

In 2025, the Peruvian-Japanese restaurant Maido was named the best in the world.
Yet, Central had held the title before joining the icons of global gastronomy. Its tasting menu became famous not for its trophies but for the way it led diners through Peru’s landscapes — from the cold Pacific coast to the high Andes and the vast Amazon.

That same ambition is reflected in Central’s Barranco space, designed by Rafael Freyre, who built it with materials from each of Peru’s main regions: coastal clay for the walls, stones that echo Andean terraces, and woods from the Amazon.

Just two blocks from Freyre’s studio, Corinna Silva-Rodríguez founded Cotto, creating ceramics for Peru’s most acclaimed restaurants. Their proximity reflects Barranco itself — a district where gastronomy, architecture, and design are braided together.

Ancestral knowledge leading new designs

For years, creatives have hoped that the richness of Peru’s materials would receive the same international recognition as its Andean ingredients. That moment has begun to arrive.

Olinda Silvano Inuma, a Shipibo-Konibo artist and activist from the Mujeres Muralistas Soi Noma collective, briefly ran a workshop in Barranco during the pandemic. Her work has since traveled to Toronto, Paris, and Madrid and most recently to the ateliers of Dior, for whom she designed a handbag.

Barranco resident Chiara Macchiavello, through her fashion brand Escvdo, works with artisans and women facing barriers to employment to reinvent ancestral textile techniques in sustainable fashion. Her pieces now appear on runways in Copenhagen and Milan.

Born in Cajamarca to an Iranian family, Mozhdeh Matin runs a design studio just minutes from Barranco’s main plaza. Her collections preserve ancestral techniques while exploring new materials — including natural latex, developed in partnership with Ecomusa, a community-driven initiative in the Peruvian Amazon.

French designer Thibault Van der Straet has made Barranco his home, transforming ponchos and ancestral textiles into rugs, sofas, and ottomans. His reinterpretations of Peruvian weaving traditions have appeared on the covers of Elle and Architectural Digest.

Barranco: A Balcony over the Pacific

Barranco is Lima’s balcony over the sea. On winter dawns, fog crashes against its cliffs while runners pass along the seafront; on summer dusks, the malecón fills with people watching the sky burn red and purple.

Beyond its mansions and museums, Barranco is also a district shaped by the everyday lives of its working people.

Long before it became Lima’s picturesque postcard, it was a seaside community, where families lived beneath violet jacarandas trees and children raced down the stairways to the shore.

Popular Life That Kept Barranco Alive

When Lima’s elites built their summer houses in the late 19th century, they brought with them cooks, gardeners, and maids—workers who quietly filled the backstreets and alleyways with their own homes and routines.

At the same time, Barranco became home to central figures of 20th-century Peruvian culture: writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Blanca Varela, and Martín Adán; painters and sculptors like Fernando de Szyszlo, José Tola, Tilsa Tsuchiya, and Lika Mutal; the Marxist and indigenist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, one of the few South Americans studied in the global history of ideas; and the legendary singer and poet Chabuca Granda.

In the late 20th-century, during the crises of the 1980s and 90s, it was the residents who kept the district alive. While mansions decayed, huariques -family-run eateries- served flavored chicken broth at dawn, artisans sold their crafts in the markets, and peñas , Afro-Peruvian parties, filled the nights with guitars and cajones.

This is why many guides still repeat the cliché of the “bohemian neighborhood.”

The City of Windmills

Arriving from Miraflores, visitors are welcomed by a windmill, recalling a time when Barranco was known as "the city of windmills."

For decades, wealthier families funded windmills to produce drinkable water. Even though the windmills were a symbol of the aristocracy's private use of common resources, the water was shared among the community, which fostered a strong sense of solidarity and unity.

On the Edge of the Pacific:

Is Barranco the New Latin American Creative District?

What to do in Barranco, Peru

Music in the Streets

It is not unusual to run into members of Hit La Rosa, who played on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. That same stage has hosted the iconic Afro-Peruvian singer and Grammy winner Susana Baca, who lives in neighboring Chorrillos, as well as Los Mirlos, pioneers of psychedelic Amazonian cumbia, who recently collaborated with the Peruvian-New Yorker rapper A.Chal, another frequent visitor to the district.

Murals in the Streets

Today, visitors photograph the murals that cover Barranco’s walls. Several renowned street artists have chosen the district as their base, including Entes, who has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bogotá, and Xomatok, who has painted murals for both Barranco and Louis Vuitton. Jade Rivera, who is known for transforming old houses into creative museums and labs, is the artist behind the mural "The Home of Sighs." Located near the bridge of the same name in Barranco, this is perhaps the most photographed image in Lima.

Barranco-based artist, Elliot Tupac, the most celebrated of them all, reinterpreted chicha lettering. Emerging during the years of Peru’s armed conflict, this hand-painted, neon-colored aesthetic—fuchsia, fluorescent yellow, lime green—became a symbol of Lima’s pride and a way for the popular classes to claim creative power against the elites who once ruled Barranco’s mansions.

The Legacy of the Windmills

Of the many windmills that gave Barranco its name, only one survives, now covered in ivy. Perhaps like Peruvian creativity itself: hidden for too long, but ready to be admired.

In just a few blocks, Barranco condenses the diversity and complexity of Peruvian culture. Creativity braids its pieces together — carrying us from shame to pride — and makes this small oasis on the arid cliffs above the Pacific one of the most singular places in the world.

The Legacy of the Windmills

Of the many windmills that gave Barranco its name, only one survives, now covered in ivy. Perhaps like Peruvian creativity itself: hidden for too long, but ready to be admired.