Our Saturday started, as so many of our weekends seem to start at the moment, with the renovation of the house. We are reaching the stage where the large construction decisions increasingly turn into dozens of smaller ones: lighting, electrical components, furniture details, fittings and all the other things that eventually transform a building site into somewhere we can actually live. This time we went to LuminaLED to buy a few more things for the house, and afterwards decided to visit Port Mall, which is in the same general part of Chișinău. I knew the mall existed and had some idea that it was large, but until Saturday we had never properly explored it.
What was intended as another practical stop during a day of renovation shopping turned into something considerably more interesting. We were impressed almost immediately, first by the location and then by the sheer scale of the place. Port Mall is not a modest local shopping centre with an ambitious name: its published information describes approximately 41,000 square metres of total space, around 32,000 square metres of commercial area, four cinema halls and parking for roughly 1,000 cars. It is presented as the largest shopping centre in Moldova, and after spending some time walking around it, that claim did not seem particularly surprising.
Almost everything in one place
What impressed us was not simply the physical size, but how complete the place felt. As we walked through it, we repeatedly recognised shops and brands that we already visit elsewhere in Chișinău. Instead of remembering which shopping centre contains one shop and which retail area contains another, Port Mall seemed to bring together almost everything we regularly look for. There are fashion and homeware shops, pharmacies, cosmetics, restaurants, services and entertainment, together with a substantial food area and cinema complex. According to Port Mall, the fashion area alone represents more than 250 brands, while the home section occupies about 4,700 square metres.
That is particularly useful to us at the moment because our mental map of Chișinău is increasingly defined by where one buys things for a house. Renovation has given us an expanding collection of places for lighting, electrical equipment, furniture, building materials, kitchen components and the dozens of smaller items that nobody thinks much about until they renovate a property. Discovering such a large concentration of familiar shops in one location immediately made Port Mall useful to us rather than merely impressive as a building.
The interior itself also contributes significantly to that impression. From the upper levels, the building opens into a large central space extending down through several floors, with glass balustrades, escalators, light-coloured surfaces and a great deal of natural light. Looking down through the atrium gives a much better sense of the building's scale than simply walking along one level. It is modern without being excessively theatrical, and it reminded us strongly of large shopping centres we have visited elsewhere in Europe.
There is also a significant entertainment component. Port Mall includes a family entertainment centre and a four-screen cinema complex, while the wider area around the mall contains additional leisure attractions. Close by are an aqua park and an amusement area, making it possible to imagine coming to this part of the city for considerably more than shopping. The combination of retail, restaurants and entertainment gives the whole development the character of a destination rather than simply a collection of shops surrounded by a car park.
The view from the top changed my impression
The part I had not expected at all was upstairs. The food area on the top floor opens onto an exterior terrace, and stepping outside gave us an entirely different perspective on both Port Mall and its location. Immediately below us were enormous parking areas, almost completely filled with cars when we were there. Beyond them, however, the landscape opened dramatically into greenery, lower-density development and the city stretching across the distant horizon. On a clear and beautifully sunny September afternoon, the visibility was excellent.
It is an impressive panoramic view of Chișinău and its surroundings, particularly because one does not expect to find it while visiting a shopping centre. From street level, Port Mall is simply a very large commercial building. From the terrace, its position on the outer edge of the densely built city becomes much easier to understand. We could look back towards Chișinău across a broad landscape while immediately below us thousands of people were arriving, shopping, eating and spending their Saturday afternoon in one of Moldova's newest large commercial developments.
The photograph I took from the terrace captures that contrast particularly well. In the foreground is the intensely developed commercial environment: buildings, terraces, roads and row after row of parked cars. Beyond it is an enormous amount of green and comparatively open land, followed eventually by the urban landscape in the distance. Standing there, I had the distinct feeling of looking not merely at Chișinău as it exists today, but at an area where the relationship between the city and its outskirts could change considerably over the coming years.
That location is important to how I experienced Port Mall. Its official address is still in Chișinău, so describing it literally as being outside the city would be inaccurate in an administrative sense. Physically, however, it sits towards the outer edge of Chișinău's dense urban fabric, close to Chișinău Arena and surrounded by much more open land than one encounters in the centre. Looking at the map after our visit made the geography even clearer. The mall feels like an edge-of-city development, and that observation triggered two quite different memories.
Milan first, then Rio de Janeiro
For both of us, the immediate comparison was with a shopping centre we visited in Milan a few years ago. I do not mean that the buildings are architecturally identical, and I would not attempt to identify some precise design lineage between them. It was the overall experience that felt familiar: the scale, the modern interior, the large open spaces, the concentration of shops and restaurants and the sense that the mall itself was intended to be somewhere people spend part of their day rather than somewhere they simply complete an errand and leave.
For me, however, the location produced another and much older association. Port Mall reminded me of BarraShopping in Rio de Janeiro, which I knew back in the late 1980s. That comparison reaches almost forty years into my past, to a completely different city and period of my life, but the memory came back remarkably strongly while I was standing on the terrace looking towards Chișinău.
Barra da Tijuca in those days was very different from the densely developed part of Rio that it has since become. BarraShopping had opened in 1981 and was already an enormous commercial destination when I knew it later that decade, but much of the surrounding area was still undergoing rapid development. The mall was not buried inside an old, mature urban centre. It was associated with a newer part of Rio that was expanding around it, with space for considerably more development still visible in the surrounding landscape.
That recollection is not simply something my memory has invented over the intervening decades. BarraShopping's own published history describes the mall as an important factor in the occupation and development of Barra da Tijuca at a time when the neighbourhood was still comparatively little developed. I would not suggest that Port Mall and BarraShopping are equivalent developments, or that Chișinău will somehow reproduce the urban history of Barra da Tijuca. Cities do not develop according to such simple templates. What interested me was the similarity in the feeling of standing at a substantial commercial development near the expanding edge of a city and looking across land whose future appearance may be very different from its appearance today.
A city that feels as though it is moving
That comparison connects with something I have increasingly felt since moving to Moldova. I am becoming very optimistic about Chișinău's direction of travel. This does not mean pretending that the city has no problems, nor does it mean believing that every new building automatically represents good urban development. What I see, however, is a remarkable amount of activity. New residential buildings are appearing, existing properties are being renovated, businesses are opening, commercial areas are developing and there is a visible appetite for investment and improvement.
Port Mall fits naturally into that picture. Independent commercial property information published by Moldova's Investment Agency classifies it as a Class A shopping centre launched in 2023, with an estimated 32,000 square metres of gross leasable area. It is therefore not merely my impression that this is a substantial project. More interesting to me than the statistics, however, is what an investment of this scale says about expectations. Large commercial developments require capital, customers, transport, businesses willing to rent space and, above all, some confidence that the economic activity surrounding them will continue.
There was certainly no shortage of customers on Saturday. The view from above showed car parks packed with vehicles, while inside the mall there were people shopping, eating and moving between the different floors. A single busy Saturday does not constitute an economic indicator, of course, but it does affect the subjective experience of the place. Port Mall did not feel like an oversized development waiting hopefully for a future population to arrive. It felt busy and established already.
This matters to me because we are no longer observing Moldova simply as visitors. We are renovating a home here and gradually building another phase of our lives around Chișinău. Questions about shops, infrastructure, internet connectivity, transport, utilities, services and the direction in which the city is developing have therefore become practical questions rather than tourist observations. Every time I encounter another substantial investment, whether residential, commercial or technological, it contributes to my sense that there is considerable confidence in what Chișinău can become.
Then we drove back onto the road
Unfortunately, there is an enormous contradiction in all of this, and it becomes apparent almost as soon as one leaves developments such as Port Mall. Chișinău can present a modern commercial complex that would not feel out of place in many European cities, with contemporary architecture, international retailers, large-scale entertainment and thousands of customers, yet some of the public roads used to reach these developments remain in remarkably poor condition. This continues to be one of the things that surprises and frustrates me most about living here.
I have driven in many countries, and I am not expecting every road in Moldova to resemble a newly resurfaced German motorway. Moldova has a different economic history, different resources and a very different starting point. Even allowing for all of that, however, some road surfaces in and around Chișinău are simply terrible. Broken surfaces, uneven repairs and infrastructure that appears to have been patched repeatedly rather than comprehensively reconstructed can make travelling through otherwise rapidly developing parts of the city feel as though the public and private environments belong to different decades.
My instinctive description is often that the roads feel completely Soviet. I use that as a description of the experience rather than as a literal historical claim that every damaged road surface we encounter was laid before 1991. Some roads have obviously been repaired or reconstructed since independence, and Chișinău continues to invest in rehabilitation. What persists is the impression of inherited infrastructure that has not kept pace with the buildings, businesses and private investment now appearing around it.
There are understandable structural reasons for that difference. A private developer can finance and construct a shopping centre as a defined project with a clear commercial return. Rebuilding an urban road network is a much more complicated public undertaking involving budgets, drainage, underground utilities, traffic management, land, planning and years of accumulated infrastructure decisions. Development rarely progresses uniformly, and there is nothing particularly unusual about private investment moving faster than public infrastructure in a rapidly changing economy.
Understanding the reasons does not make the potholes any more pleasant, but it does put the contrast into perspective. In fact, looking from Port Mall's terrace made that contradiction more visible than it had been from ground level. Here was a large, modern and busy development overlooking a city that is clearly expanding and changing, while the infrastructure connecting different parts of that city still has a great deal of catching up to do.
Looking at Chișinău from its edge
Saturday therefore became another small example of what I increasingly find fascinating about living in Moldova. We started the day doing something completely mundane: buying more equipment for the renovation of our house. A visit to LuminaLED led us to Port Mall, where we unexpectedly discovered a commercial development that reminded both of us of Milan and, in my case, brought back memories of Rio de Janeiro almost forty years ago. We found most of the shops we regularly use, explored the interior, reached the food area upstairs and then walked outside onto a terrace with a view that changed how I understood the location completely.
The strongest memory I will probably retain from the visit is that view. Standing high above the packed car parks, looking across open green areas towards Chișinău in the distance, I could see both what already exists and how much physical space remains around this edge of the city. I have no idea exactly what will be built there or how quickly the area will change, and it would be foolish to pretend that one afternoon provides a forecast of Chișinău's future. What it did give me was a very tangible sense of a city whose present shape does not feel final.
That is probably why the BarraShopping memory returned so strongly. When I knew Barra da Tijuca in the late 1980s, I could not possibly have predicted in detail what that part of Rio would eventually become. I simply knew that I was in an area where major development was already taking place and where there was still an enormous amount of space around it. Looking back now, the transformation was extraordinary. Standing at Port Mall almost four decades later, in a completely different country and under completely different economic circumstances, I recognised something of that same sensation.
I do not want to turn a shopping centre into evidence for some inevitable economic miracle. Moldova still has serious structural challenges, and the condition of some of Chișinău's roads is an immediate, physical reminder of them. Development also needs good planning, transport, public infrastructure and services if it is to produce a genuinely better city rather than simply more buildings. The fact that private investment is moving quickly makes the need to improve those public systems more urgent, not less.
Nevertheless, I came away from Port Mall feeling distinctly positive. There is an energy in Chișinău at the moment that I find difficult to ignore, particularly because we are now personally invested in what happens here. We are rebuilding a home, learning the city in far greater detail than a visitor ever would and watching new developments appear around us. Some days that means dealing with bureaucracy, construction problems or dreadful roads. On Saturday it meant standing on a terrace above an enormous shopping centre, looking across the city and thinking about how different the same view might be ten or twenty years from now.
For a day that began with buying a few more things for the house, that was an unexpectedly interesting conclusion.
Where relevant, factual references were checked against the sources noted below. Comparisons with Milan and Barra da Tijuca, as well as my impressions of Chișinău's roads, development and future prospects, remain personal recollections and opinions. The final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.
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