The Largest Shopping Malls in South America

Ask which shopping mall in South America is the biggest, and you will get a different answer depending on who is doing the bragging. Mall owners measure their giants in at least three incompatible ways, then quote whichever number flatters them most. Sort out the accounting, though, and one winner stands clear of the pack, and it is not the Bogota mall that older rankings kept crowning. It is a value-priced colossus in the east end of Sao Paulo. Here are the heavyweights, what they actually hold, and why the scoreboard is such a mess.

South America's Biggest Malls

Shopping Aricanduva, Sao Paulo, Brazil

This is the real champion, and it is not close. Shopping Aricanduva, in the Cidade Lider district of eastern Sao Paulo, holds about 263,000 square meters of leasable space inside roughly 440,000 square meters of built area, which makes it the largest mall in Brazil, the largest in Latin America once you set Panama aside, and the biggest in the entire Southern Hemisphere. It is really three malls wearing one name: Shopping Leste Aricanduva for general retail, Interlar for furniture and home goods, and Auto Shopping for car dealerships, which is why old listings mistook Peugeot, Honda, and Volkswagen for anchor tenants. The actual anchors are humbler, a Carrefour hypermarket plus value chains like Renner, Riachuelo, and Marisa, because this is a working-class giant rather than a luxury one. It opened in 1991, runs more than 500 stores and over a dozen cinema screens, parks nearly 15,000 cars, and sells itself with the unbeatable slogan "Gigante como Sao Paulo," or "gigantic like Sao Paulo." For once, the marketing undersells it.

Costanera Center, Santiago, Chile

Chile's most famous mall is also its most vertical. Costanera Center, in Santiago's Providencia district, runs more than 350 stores and about 138,000 square meters of leasable space, with the three big Chilean department stores, Falabella, Paris, and Ripley, a Jumbo hypermarket, and luxury names like Louis Vuitton and Gucci. What sets it apart is the thing bolted to the top of it: the Gran Torre Santiago, a 300-meter tower designed by Cesar Pelli that is the tallest building anywhere in South America. The mall opened in June 2012, and its owner, the retail group Cencosud, has spent years billing it as the largest in Latin America. That is marketing, not measurement. Aricanduva dwarfs it, and by leasable area it is not even the biggest mall in its own city, since Santiago's Mallplaza Vespucio quietly edges it out. Costanera just has the better view.

Centro Mayor, Bogota, Colombia

For years this was the mall that topped the South America lists, usually with an inflated 280,000-square-meter figure attached. The truer numbers are still substantial: about 235,000 square meters of built area and roughly 109,000 square meters of leasable space, which makes Centro Mayor the largest mall in Bogota, and one of the biggest in Colombia, by the yardstick that counts. It opened in March 2010 in the south of the city, anchored by the department store Falabella and the home-improvement chain Easy, with the usual supporting cast of McDonald's, Crepes and Waffles, and a Bancolombia branch. It is a genuine heavyweight. It is just not the continental champion the old rankings claimed.

Centro Comercial Santafe, Bogota, Colombia

Up in the Suba district of northern Bogota, Centro Comercial Santafe opened in May 2006 and covers about 250,000 square meters of total area. It runs 572 shops, a food court with 26 restaurants and seating for 1,500, ten cinema screens, and parking for 4,100 cars, with Zara, Falabella, and a Jumbo hypermarket among the draws. By gross leasable area it is the fourth-largest mall in Colombia and, by its own accounting, the fifth-largest in Latin America, a ranking it cheerfully concedes is capped by Aricanduva over in Brazil. Older write-ups undercounted it at 485 stores, which is the rare case of a mall being too modest about its size.

Quicentro Sur Shopping, Quito, Ecuador

Ecuador's entry sits in the south of Quito, right next to the Estadio Olimpico Atahualpa, so shoppers and football crowds get to share the same gridlock. Quicentro Sur opened in 2010 with around 160,000 square meters of total area, about 350 stores, and parking for roughly 3,000 cars. Older descriptions piled on oddly specific trivia about who managed it and which firm drew up the blueprints, none of which holds up to checking, so treat the building as the fact and the backstory as decoration.

Unicenter, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Argentina's largest and busiest mall has been pulling crowds in Greater Buenos Aires since 1988, which by mall standards makes it an elder statesman. Unicenter carries more than 300 stores, a 14-screen cinema, and the full lineup of international labels Argentine shoppers expect. Owned, like Costanera Center, by Chile's Cencosud, it is proof that you do not have to be the biggest on the continent to be the one everybody actually visits.

Why "Biggest" Is Such a Slippery Word

Here is the catch that trips up every mall ranking: there is no single agreed way to measure a shopping center. Total built area counts everything, parking ramps and service corridors included, and it is the figure that produces those eye-watering numbers near half a million square meters. Gross leasable area, or GLA, counts only the space a tenant can actually rent, and it is the metric the retail industry treats as fair game. Total complex area throws in offices, hotels, and towers for good measure. Aricanduva sits near 440,000 square meters built but 263,000 leasable, and depending on which number a mall picks, it can leap or tumble several spots. The honest comparison uses leasable area, which is why the table below looks different from the rankings you may have seen.

The Largest Shopping Malls in South America

Ranked the fair way, by gross leasable area, the top of the continent looks like this. Brazil dominates, which is no surprise from a country with more than 650 malls. The figures are approximate, rounded, and drawn from each operator's leasable-area reporting, so they will not match the inflated built-area numbers malls prefer to quote. Two giants profiled above, Buenos Aires' Unicenter and Quito's Quicentro Sur, sit out the table because their owners publish total floor area rather than a clean leasable figure.

The Bottom Line

Strip away the marketing and the math gets simple. By the measure that counts, the leasable space where shopping actually happens, Sao Paulo's Aricanduva is the largest mall in South America, and it is not close. Behind it the order is less intuitive than the famous names suggest, with Lima's Jockey Plaza and Santiago's Mallplaza Vespucio outranking glitzier rivals like Costanera Center. The rest is a contest over which yardstick to use, and malls will keep reaching for the one that makes them sound the most enormous. So the next time a shopping center calls itself the biggest in the land, the only honest follow-up is: biggest by what?