Mongolia: The New Frontier for Luxury Shopping

What happens when a country previously hindered by vastness and foreign rule awakens to wealth on its doorstep? With Louis Vuitton on one corner and one of the world’s largest gold deposits down the road, the previously nomadic society of Mongolia is putting down some rich roots.

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Into the Mystic: Inside Cartagena

Rafael del Castillo and I had never met, but a mutual friend put us in touch before I left for Cartagena. “Rafa” came from one of the leading families there and had married a former beauty queen. “The night you arrive, come to dinner at my house,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I’ll pick you up.” True to his word, Rafa appeared promptly at my hotel and brought me to his home, the top-floor apartment in a gleaming twelve-story glass and concrete building in the Bocagrande area. The slick boutiques and luxury residential towers of this chic stretch of waterfront, bordering a peninsula just south of the city’s colonial center, sprang up only in the past decade. Today Bocagrande, which has some of Colombia’s most expensive real estate, is the neighborhood of choice for those who prefer, and can afford, ocean-side modern.

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