Two malls, a mountain, and a bridge
A few weeks ago I nearly became part of an inauguration ceremony myself, though not through any ambition on my part to mingle with visiting heads of state. I was halfway across the road when a presidential motorcade rounded the corner like a fire
brigade racing to a conflagration, and only a combination of good luck and quick reactions kept me out of trouble.
President Daniel Noboa had come to town to preside over the opening of Mall del Alto, the newest and by some distance most ambitious shopping center the city has produced, and in the days that followed almost everyone I spoke with claimed some connection to its hiring drive. That is not surprising once you look at the numbers. The project employed roughly 2,500 construction workers over eighteen months, generated an estimated 3,000 indirect jobs feeding off the new commercial activity, and added another 1,500 direct positions when the doors finally opened.
So recently I went to see for myself what all the fuss was about, and then, because one visit rarely tells the whole story, I went back a second time with an actual shopping list in hand.
The first thing that strikes you is the sheer scale of the place, which photographs simply fail to capture. Built into the hillside above the city in the parish of Turi, on a 16 hectare site beside the Cuenca-Azogues highway, the complex rises through four floors of retail and banking, plus two underground parking levels, in a way that seems more like a modern airport terminal than any shopping center Cuenca has known before. The construction runs past 117,000 square meters, with roughly 50,000 of those leasable to the 136 stores and 80 kiosks now operating inside.
The company behind it, Grupo Ortiz, is not exactly a newcomer to this game. Twenty years ago the same family business built Mall del RĆo just across the highway, and the $100 million Mall del Alto now joins it under a shared marketing banner, the Ciudad Comercial del RĆo, which also folds in the convention center and the Four Points hotel.
These twin malls are connected, at least on paper, by a 46-meter pedestrian bridge fitted with moving platforms in the center of the bridge, the kind of thing you usually find ferrying travelers between terminals at a major airport. The reality, once you actually try to walk it, is rather less glamorous.
Getting to the bridge from Mall del RĆo means a stiff uphill climb first, and the moving walkways themselves turn out to be short, almost token gestures rather than the effortless airport-style crossing the marketing implies. One exuberant mall executive compared it to the people movers found in Doha or Dubai, which tells you something about how seriously this company takes the business of getting Cuencanos with bank cards from one mall to another. It tells you rather less about what the walk actually feels like on a warm afternoon with shopping bags.
And that, in a sense, is the strangest part of the whole development. The anchor tenant at Mall del Alto is a Coral hypermarket, another Grupo Ortiz brand, and there is already a Coral hypermarket at Mall del RĆo on the opposite side of the bridge.
You can clamber up the hill from one giant shopping center directly into the doors of a sister branch of the same supermarket you just left, assuming you can find what you came for once you arrive.
On our second visit we went looking for something as unremarkable as hair elastics,Ā ligasĀ orĀ ligitasĀ in the local Spanish, and were told the Mall del Alto branch simply did not carry them. A sales clerk suggested, without any apparent sense of irony, that we try the other Coral at Mall del RĆo instead, which rather raises the question of what two branches of the same hypermarket within sight of each other are actually for, if not to cover each other’s gaps. Convenient for Grupo Ortiz, perhaps, in keeping shoppers circulating between its own properties. Less obviously convenient for anyone who just wants a hair tie and would rather not make a pilgrimage across a highway bridge to get one.
Not everything inside repeats itself, however. About eighty percent of the brands in the new mall are said to be new to Cuenca, among them GAP, H&M, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Tommy Hilfiger, several of which are opening their first stores anywhere south of Quito or Guayaquil. H&M alone has taken a 3,000 square meter flagship, the largest single store in the building, and the Spanish design houses Adolfo DomĆnguez and PurificaciĆ³n GarcĆa have moved in as well, suggesting that someone in the leasing office decided Cuenca was finally ready for handbags with European price tags attached. Some of the smaller boutiques take that logic further still. I passed at least one watch display where nothing carried a price tag at all, the unmistakable signal that if you need to ask, the store has already decided you are not its customer.
The entertainment floor pushes the airport comparison even further, though the value proposition is not always clear. There is a multi-level electric go-kart circuit billed as the first of its kind in Latin America, and rides run $20 a turn, though nobody at the counter seemed eager to specify exactly how long that buys you. For that price I would want a solid half hour on the track, not a few quick laps before being waved off for the next customer.
The amusement arcade works on a card system, and topping up $50 earns a $20 bonus, which sounds generous until you start doing the arithmetic on how far either amount actually stretches. An hour of entertainment for a family of four ought to come with a clearer answer than a vague promise of bonus credit.
There is also an immersive bowling alley wired with lights and augmented reality, a large-scale playground where you can park your child for $14 per hour, and a lobby area the developers describe, apparently without irony, as Las Vegas style. The movie theater, for what it is worth, is perfectly serviceable but on the day in question was showing exactly the same releases as the theater across the bridge at Mall del RĆo, so do not expect it to widen your options.
A rooftop solar installation with close to 6,000 panels supplies several megawatts of power, and a rainwater collection system irrigates more than 17,000 plants spread across the facades, interiors and slopes, with another 5,000 reportedly on the way. Whether that figure in the press releases refers to individual plants or to plant species I am not entirely sure, though either reading leaves Mall del Alto with a stronger claim to being a botanical garden than most shopping centers ever manage.
None of that compares, in my view, to the food court. Sitting on the top floor with a coffee and a piece of cake, you get a panoramic sweep across the rooftops, church towers and surrounding mountains that no amount of retail theory can improve on. The terrace works as a genuineĀ mirador, a viewing platform that would be worth the climb even without a single store attached to it, and on our second visit it remained the best reason to make the trip. So even if the shopping disappoints, the view will not, and it could potentially put competingĀ miradorsĀ out of business.
The shopping, though, did disappoint, at least on our second outing. We arrived with a short list of half a dozen ordinary items and left having found precisely none of them, the hair elastics being only the first casualty. For a mall this size, with this much square footage and this many new international names, it seems a curious gap that the everyday basics are the things hardest to track down.
When I first visited on a weekday afternoon the place felt sparsely populated, the parking levels largely empty and the corridors carrying the slightly hollow echo of a theater before the audience arrives. That may simply reflect timing rather than appetite. For nearly two weeks after the opening, the right lane of the Avenida de las Americas was cordoned off with traffic cones to manage the crowds heading in, and EMOV only lifted the restriction at the start of June once the initial rush had subsided. Weekday afternoons and weekend afternoons remain two different cities in Cuenca, and I suspect this mall will prove no exception.
What the whole project really demonstrates is confidence, both in Cuenca’s growth and in shoppers’ willingness to climb the mountain, cross a bridge that turns out to be more uphill hike than airport glide, and walk straight into a second branch of a hypermarket that, on the day we needed it, still could not produce a hair tie or a hair brush.
Grupo Ortiz, a company that reported over half a billion dollars in revenue last year, evidently believes the model works well enough to repeat it, because further similar malls are already planned for Quito, Machala, SamborondĆ³n and Loja over the next three years. Mall del Alto may end up being remembered less as a one-off curiosity and more as a template for how one local company intends to build out the next decade of Ecuadorian retail.
For now, it sits on its hillside above the city, gleaming and spacious, asking shoppers to decide for themselves whether two giant malls connected by a hike and a bridge and a shared hypermarket brand represent genuine choice or simply the same choice offered twice, with the second branch occasionally unable to supply what the first one lacks.
But if you want a luxury lunch that comes with a free Cuencana panorama and huge curving screens showing the World Cup, it remains unbeatable.
