Costa Verde

This guide to Costa Verde in Lima opens with an eighteen-storey hotel sunk into cliffs a city ordinance says may never be built on again, and traces how that happened: unstable sand-and-silt slopes, a 2010 law banning new construction after a building called Aquamarina showed what could go wrong, and a decades-old construction permit that let the hotel company proceed anyway. It follows the fight between the mall's owners and an engineer from the National University of Engineering over what the seeping water is doing underneath. Below it all runs the six-lane highway carved from the cliffs in the 1960s.