Country Club Lima Hotel

The Country Club Lima Hotel opened in 1927 as the social centrepiece of San Isidro, the garden district Lima's establishment built for itself, and it has never surrendered the role. The white hacienda-style building—arcaded, balconied, crowned with towers—faces the fairways of the Lima Golf Club across a quiet avenue, and its public rooms double as a gallery: some three hundred works of Peruvian colonial art, on loan from the Museo Pedro de Osma, hang through the lobbies, corridors and suites, from gilded Cusco School canvases to viceregal portraiture.

Interiors trade in a gracious criollo formality of carved wood, wrought iron and stained glass, with rooms that are large by any capital's standards and quietly updated beneath the period dress. The English Bar, wood-panelled and clubbable, is a Lima institution for a pisco sour, while the Perroquet restaurant has long ranked among the city's most distinguished dining rooms for its refined Peruvian and international cooking.

San Isidro's embassies, business towers and El Olivar's ancient olive grove are all within a short stroll, and Miraflores' celebrated restaurant scene is ten minutes by taxi—useful in a city that has become one of the world's great eating capitals. As a base that combines Lima's history, gastronomy and greenest quarter, the Country Club remains the classic choice.