While American malls hollowed out, Mexico City's kept growing, and five of them are worth a stop in their own right.
Mexico City's malls are expanding while American ones close: roughly 400 US malls have shut since 2007, while Mexico is on track to open around 15 new ones by the end of 2025 alone, partly because e-commerce never displaced brick-and-mortar shopping here the way it did in the US, and partly because malls function as modern town squares as much as retail. Five are worth a stop for more than the shopping: Plaza Satélite, the country's first American-style mall; Perisur, once the largest in Mexico; Antara Fashion Hall, which created the Nuevo Polanco district around it; Parque Delta; and Toreo Parque Central, built on the site of a demolished bullring.
American malls have spent the last two decades hollowing out, somewhere around 400 closed since 2007, with hundreds more expected to follow. Mexico City’s have done the opposite: the country is on track to open roughly 15 new malls by the end of 2025 alone, and the city already has some of the highest retail space per resident anywhere in Latin America. Part of that is e-commerce never displacing brick-and-mortar shopping here the way it did in the US; part of it is that a mall here functions as something closer to a modern zócalo, a town square with air conditioning, than a pure retail destination. Five are worth the trip for reasons that have nothing to do with buying anything.
Plaza Satélite opened October 13, 1971, in Ciudad Satélite just north of the city, and it was Mexico’s first American-style shopping mall, four anchor stores (Sears, Liverpool, Sanborns, and París-Londres), 150 retail units, parking for 3,000 cars, and at the time the largest movie theater in Latin America at 1,400 seats. It was designed by architect Juan Sordo Madaleno, and it sits right next to his era’s other major landmark in the area: the Torres de Satélite, five brightly colored concrete towers built in 1958 by sculptor Mathias Goeritz and architect Luis Barragán, originally planned as seven reaching 200 meters before the final version settled at five, the tallest just 52.
Perisur opened in 1980 as the largest mall in Mexico by total area, 450,000 square meters and 270 stores anchored by Liverpool, Sears, and Palacio de Hierro, in the south near Ciudad Universitaria and the Pedregal. Juan Sordo Madaleno designed this one too, his second major mall after Satélite, and its land has an odd origin: Televisa’s Emilio Azcárraga Milmo transferred it to the developers to settle a construction debt left over from building Estadio Azteca in the 1960s.
Antara opened in 2006, a generation after Perisur, on what used to be factory land, and it’s generally credited as Mexico City’s first true open-air mall, a format that didn’t exist here before it. The effect went beyond the mall itself: Antara is widely considered the project that turned the surrounding warehouses and empty lots into Nuevo Polanco, the district that now also holds Museo Soumaya and Museo Jumex a short walk away. It was designed by architect Javier Sordo Madaleno, Juan’s son, closing out three generations of the same family’s malls across 35 years; three stories, around 140 stores anchored by Palacio de Hierro, and it’s also where Ulta Beauty chose to open its first Mexico location.
Parque Delta opened in 2005 on the site of the old Parque Delta stadium, which passed through a Ford dealership’s ownership before Grupo Gigante redeveloped the land into the mall. It leans more toward entertainment than the others: bowling, a multiplex, and a food court that draws a genuine neighborhood crowd rather than just visitors, expanded further in 2016. It’s part of the same ownership group, Grupo Danhos, that also built Toreo Parque Central.
Before it was a mall, this was El Toreo de Cuatro Caminos, a bullring that opened in 1947 (with roots on the same site back to 1894), a 60-meter steel dome seating 25,000 that hosted bullfights, boxing, and wrestling, and gave the Cuatro Caminos metro station its name. It was demolished in 2008, and Grupo Danhos replaced it with Toreo Parque Central, which soft-opened in 2014 and held its official opening in 2015 with then-president Enrique Peña Nieto in attendance. The mall is part of a larger 473,000-square-meter complex that also includes three office towers and a hotel, built on the footprint of a demolished arena most visitors walking through the food court have no idea was ever there.
Mall closure and opening figures reference recent retail industry reporting on the US and Mexican mall sectors. Plaza Satélite, Perisur, Antara, Parque Delta, and Toreo Parque Central’s opening dates, architects, sizes, and ownership history reference each site’s own documented history; the Torres de Satélite’s design and the Toreo de Cuatro Caminos bullring’s history reference their own documented records.
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