Country Club Lima Hotel

In 1927 San Isidro was still farmland on the southern edge of Lima, with the colonial olive grove of El Olivar at its centre, when a large hotel in the neocolonial style opened beside the new golf course. The Country Club Lima Hotel was built to anchor the garden suburb that the city's leading families were beginning to settle in that direction. San Isidro has since grown into the capital's financial district, but the hotel still looks over the fairways of the Lima Golf Club, and pisco sours are still poured in its English Bar.

History

The hotel belongs to the 1920s, the decade in which Lima expanded south towards the sea along new avenues, and in which San Isidro was laid out as a residential quarter of villas and gardens. It opened in 1927 and soon became a social centre for the new district: dances, receptions and weddings were held in its salons, and visitors from abroad stayed there. Over the following decades the city caught up with it, and the fields around it became streets of houses, then of offices and embassies.

The building has kept its original structure and has been declared part of the cultural heritage of the nation by the Peruvian state. It is one of the few hotels of its era still receiving guests in Lima, and its long, low form among gardens is a reminder of how open this part of the city once was.

Architecture and design

The building is neocolonial, the style Peruvian architects adopted in the early twentieth century to revive the forms of the viceroyalty. Its white walls are set with carved wooden balconies of the kind seen on the old mansions of central Lima, and it has arcades, tiled roofs and an inner courtyard.

Inside, the hotel hangs paintings lent by the Museo Pedro de Osma, a private museum in Barranco with one of Peru's main collections of viceregal art. Many of the canvases belong to the Cusco School of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their gilded saints, archangels and Virgins in brocaded robes, and they hang in corridors, salons and guest rooms, so that the hotel works as a gallery as much as a place to sleep.

Rooms and suites

As in most buildings of its age, the rooms differ in size and shape. Many look over the golf course or the gardens, and paintings from the museum loan hang in a number of them.

Dining

The English Bar, panelled in dark wood, is one of Lima's classic places for a pisco sour, and the drink and the hotel are of an age: the cocktail took its modern form in the 1920s at the Morris Bar in central Lima, run by the American Victor Morris. Perroquet, the main restaurant, serves Peruvian and international dishes.

Weddings and events

The salons and gardens have been used for weddings and receptions since the hotel's first years, and the hotel has function rooms for meetings and banquets. Its position in San Isidro, among the offices of banks and the residences of ambassadors, makes it a common choice for business meetings.

Location

The hotel stands on Calle Los Eucaliptos in San Isidro, beside the Lima Golf Club. El Olivar, the olive grove planted in the sixteenth century from trees brought from Spain, is a park a few blocks away and one of the quiet corners of the city, home to herons and old gnarled trunks. Huaca Huallamarca, an adobe pyramid older than the Incas, stands in the same district. Miraflores and the clifftop over the Pacific are about ten minutes by car, and the historic centre, listed by UNESCO, about twenty. Jorge Chávez International Airport in Callao is roughly forty minutes away, more at rush hour. For a luxury hotel in Lima, the setting is unusually green, with the golf course on one side and gardens on the other.