Parque del Amor (Love Park)

According to Wikipedia, the park was inaugurated on 14 February 1993, Valentine's Day, and sits on the Malecon Cisneros, part of the larger Miraflores boardwalk. It has a view of the Lima coastline and the Villena bridge. In 2014 it was renamed Alberto Andrade Carmona Park in honour of the late mayor of Lima, though it remains widely known as Parque del Amor. Wikipedia adds that National Geographic magazine chose it as one of the most romantic places in the world. Accounts of who first conceived the park differ between sources, so that is left open here.

The central feature is El Beso, a large sculpture by the Peruvian artist Victor Delfin. Wikipedia says it depicts the sculptor and his wife kissing. According to local accounts reported there, the mayor of the district holds, or used to hold, a competition for the couple who could sustain the longest kiss, and the sculpture celebrates this. Reports differ on the sculpture's material and exact size, so neither is stated here.

Spanish Wikipedia records that Delfin was born on 20 December 1927 in Lobitos, on Peru's northern coast, the youngest of eight children of an oil-company worker and an indigenous mother from Sechura. He studied at the Escuela de Arte in Lima, graduated in 1958, and set up a studio in Barranco in 1965. In 2001 he was named president of the Comisión Nacional de Cultura, a forerunner of Peru's Ministry of Culture. His biography page does not mention El Beso itself.

Walls and benches around the park are decorated with mosaics bearing phrases and poems about love in Spanish and Quechua. The decoration is in the trencadis style, built from broken ceramic pieces, and is described by Wikipedia as inspired by Antoni Gaudi's Park Guell in Barcelona. The effect is a colourful, curving garden terrace quite different from the rest of the boardwalk.

Spanish Wikipedia describes the Malecon de Miraflores as a set of seafront promenades divided into the Malecon de la Marina, Malecon Cisneros, Malecon de la Reserva and Malecon 28 de Julio. Along it lie the Larcomar shopping centre, built into the cliff above the Pacific, the Parque Maria Reiche, and the Puente Eduardo Villena Rey. Paragliders take off from the cliffs, and the same source places the take-off area on the Malecon Cisneros, a few metres from the Parque del Amor.

Miraflores was a town from the seventeenth century and became a district on 2 January 1857 under President Ramon Castilla, according to Spanish Wikipedia. It was originally called San Miguel de Miraflores, after the Cartuja de Miraflores, a monastery near Burgos in Spain. The district covers about 9.62 square kilometres, with the Pacific Ocean as its western boundary, and its climate is marine, mild and humid with frequent low cloud. In January 1881, during the War of the Pacific, the Battle of Miraflores took place here, and the district is nicknamed the Heroic City as a result. Its best-known pre-Inca landmark is the Huaca Pucllana, a mud-brick temple.

The cliffs sit on the Costa Verde, a coastal strip of about 22.5 kilometres in Lima and Callao, which Wikipedia says was originally a series of cliffs beside the ocean until a highway, designed by architect Ernesto Aramburu and inaugurated on 15 December 1970, changed the landscape. The strip lies where the cold Humboldt Current meets coastal desert, and Wikipedia notes that Lima is the only South American capital facing the Pacific.

The park is a short stop on the boardwalk and is commonly paired with nearby viewpoints. Sunset is a popular time, though conditions on Lima's coast vary through the year. A private guided visit can combine the park with other Miraflores stops without the need to navigate the district independently.