Casco Viejo

Casco Viejo wears its age like an heirloom—pastel facades cracked open to the centuries underneath, bougainvillea climbing where it pleases, the Pacific keeping time against the seawall as it has for four hundred years. Across the water, the glass towers of the new city catch the light like a rumor of the future, close enough to see, far enough to feel like someone else's. Here the afternoon moves slower, as if the neighborhood remembers something the rest of the city has forgotten.