Go north, Limeño.

This article focuses on the growth of the middle class in the suburbs of Lima, Peru. Mega Plaza looks pretty much like any shopping mall, with its smart boutiques, a big department store, a multiplex cinema and a huge gym. Next door stands a second mall, Royal Plaza. What makes these duelling malls unusual is where they are: on a congested and dusty stretch of the Panamerican Highway, in what were once shantytowns and today form part of Lima's northern suburbs. When it opened two years ago, Mega Plaza defied the notion that Lima's sprawling, largely self-built suburbs are uniformly poor. Between them, the two malls clocked up sales of $130m last year. Nearly two out of three of Lima's 8m people live in three suburban "cones" that stretch out into the barren sandhills of Peru's coastal desert. Some 2.3m live in the northern cone, the oldest-established and most prosperous. To those who claim that Peru's middle class is dying, Rolando Arellano, a market researcher for Mega Plaza, responds that it is being born anew in Lima North, largely overlooked by the city's business and political elites.