Hey everyone!
This is the recap post of Galerías Pacífico Accesible, an accessibility meet-up organized as part of the One Accessibility alliance.
Galerías Pacífico is a Shopping Mall located in the center of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. It was declared a National Historic Monument because of its impressive murals and architecture. Its central dome is what stands out the most, painted by famous muralists Berni, Castagnino, Colmeiro, Spilimbergo and Urruchúa.
The mall is also the home of the Borges Cultural Center.
Besides me, @DanielEspinoza and @AdroGran attended.
We found out that the mall itself is mostly accessible: three of its four entrances are accessible, it has accessible elevators and accessible bathrooms, although some aren’t perfect as the ramp of one of them is too steep and another one wasn’t in great conditions. Its food court offers accessible seating areas.
As for the businesses, the results depend on their location. We looked at most thoroughly around of 90 of the 150 shops the mall has, this is what we noticed:
The regular stores are mostly accessible, 21 of them don’t have accessible entrances or aren’t accessible inside. Adrián pointed out that the kind of floors a couple of them have make them not accessible. There are a couple that do have accessible entrances, but have a way too thick entrance rug that makes not accessible either, and there are also many of them that did have accessible entrances but aren’t spacious enough inside.
Some of the restaurants in the food court that have their own private seating areas don’t offer accessible seating, but most of them do.
There are also shops that are actually some sort of booths by the side. Most of them aren’t accessible, especially the ones that aren’t just booths, that you can actually go in. None of them have a ramp, and almost all of them don’t have enough space. Thankfully there were some exceptions.
There aren’t so many of these kind of shops in the mall, but it still is a shame.
We verified the accessibility on the Borges Cultural Center too, it’s spacious and although there are many stairs, it also has an accessible elevator.
We had already roamed through the whole mall in a short period of time, so since all of us had some free time we continued our meet up just walking down the street.
We came across the Galería del Caminante (Walker’s Gallery), which is full of really small and full of stairs businesses, all of its shops aren’t accessible. You could say the name suits the lack of accessibility…
We later went to the General San Martín park, that has accessible ramps on one side but also has some long stairs inside with no ramps near.
Miniso, a shop that Daniel and I love, was also near so we also went there and showed it to Adrian. It’s accessible, it can be hard to access some parts if there are other people but that applies for everyone.
We finished the meet up in a nearby Starbucks that has a ramp in the entrance (!) but a big door that’s always closed that people in a wheelchair or carrying a stroller would need help opening, some seating areas of it aren’t accessible either.
In conclusion, the Galerías Pacífico are mostly accessible, but sadly three of the four other places we visited in the area afterwards aren’t accessible.
If you want to look at more photos of the meet-up you can click here to check our shared album.
Thank you for reading!
If you’re interested in Accessibility in Buenos Aires you can read the recap of the previous accessible meet up I organized in the area clicking here.
Have you ever noticed how accessible the shopping malls are in your city?
