Barranco

This guide to Barranco in Lima follows a footbridge that leads nowhere: a plank walkway built in 1876 not to connect anything, but to sell real estate after a new railway line turned a scatter of fishermen's huts into a resort for the wealthy. It traces the district's founding in that same decade and the bridge's destruction by occupying Chilean troops during the War of the Pacific in 1881. Cross the narrow walkway itself, barely wider than a doorway, under its tunnel of trees.