Lima Love Park Adventure

Yours Truly beside the Sun Window at the Love Park. The inscription reads, "Tu de este lado y yo del otro como dos remos," or "You are on one side and I am on the other like two oars." At this moment, my boyfriend Matt and I are on either end of the Atlantic Ocean! :<

 Lima’s residents have a penchant for public flora…and for public displays of affection.

Gardeners have encircled fountains and granite statues with native ornamentals since the founding of the city.

Lovers on benches, beside the water, against the cold stone, wiggling their toes in the grass: were more numerous than pigeons in Lima’s parks even then.

The Moon Window at the love park. The benches in the park were inspired by Gaudi's manic mosaics at Parque Guell in Barcelona.

Kissing bodies  younger than they should have been or more married than they should have been hid in the manicured roundabouts, screened from view by a moat of muscular horses and grinding carriage wheels.

Today, PDA is no less ubiquitous in Lima. And urban planners have extended the greenbelt with two well landscaped pedestrian promenades.

It is the custom when one makes a commitment to a loved one in the park to make a heart with pebbles in the sand with the couples initials scratched in the center.

Avenida Arequipa’s handholding strollers can walk all the way from Lima Centro to the beach between lanes of frantic traffic with impatiens at every footfall. Tourists more conspicuously walk a similar East/West route through the desirable neighborhood of Miraflores (literally “Look, flowers!”) to Parque Kennedy where cafés and art are in abundance.

Poet Antonio Cilloniz is credited for inspiring the construction of El Parque del Amor, (“The Love Park”) in the early 1990s when he made a public observation that cities only dedicated monuments to their warriors and not their lovers.

"El Beso" by Victor Delfin. Delfin and his wife were the models. They are depicted barefooot!

Planners involved in a coastline redevelopment project, which would be capped with the addition of the dramatic cliffside mall Larcomar six years later, seized the moment and commissioned a sculpture from Victor Delfin. Within months, “El Beso,” the enormous pink monument at the heart of The Love Park was erected with Cilloniz’s quote inset at the base.

There is a small set of risers set into the park across from "El Beso," where, every year on Valentine's Day, Lima residents have a contest to see which couple can kiss the longest!

I visit The Love Park and see a mother taking photos of her son and his new fiancée while wiping tears from her eyes. A gay couple and a straight couple sit holding hands on opposite sides of a long mosaic bench, each blissfully unaware of the other. Hang gliders take off from a neighboring cliff and float overhead like love letters in the sky.