Attractions
Buenos Aires's official tourism site offers downloadable maps and step-by-step instructions for 18 self-guided tours that traverse the city and introduce visitors to the city's history, sites and sounds. Barracas, La Boca, Corrientes, Nueva Pompeya, and Palermo Hollywood are just some of the neighborhoods covered by these do-it-yourself tours. The site also features three biographical tours of "outstanding characters of porteño (what BA residents call themselves) history" including Eva Perón (Evita), Jorge Luis Borges, and tango great Carlos Gardel. Download these maps and take them along for a free, self-guided romp through BA.
The BA Tourism Bureau also offers free, guided tours through the city that focus on its history, architecture, and commerce, but only hop on board if your Spanish is up to snuff as the tours are in Spanish only. Check out the tours' schedule on the site. Tours run just about every weekend, in the afternoons. One such tour visits the city's notable British pubs and ends with a free show.
BA Free Tours also offers tours at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily. With their small group size, tagging along for the 2.5-hour tour is like taking a stroll with an old English-speaking friend who happens also to be a resident of BA. Such tours are good places to start in a city as big as Buenos Aires.
On Sundays, be sure to stop by the colonial-era neighborhood of San Telmo for the antique and handicraft fair of Feria de Plaza Dorrego. The fair attracts 10,000 visitors and features 270 vendor stalls selling books, tango paraphernalia, and much more. Enjoy the festival-like atmosphere provided by mimes, buskers, and tango performers.
Take an evening stroll down Avenida Corrientes (Corrientes Avenue), a bustling street, emblematic of BA. It's full of cafés, theaters, pizzerias, and bookstores, some of which are open past midnight on the weekends.
BA's Barrio Chino (Chinatown), established in the 1980s, is also worth a visit to see one of the few Buddhist temples in the city and watch fishmongers at work.
Take in the many-hued homes of Calle Lanín (Lanin Street). Painter Marino Santa María painted the exterior of his home in the nineties and inspired others to do so too, resulting in 35 brilliantly colored homes along three blocks of this quaint street.
Enjoy the neighborhood of Caminito, essentially an open-sky museum featuring works by Roberto Capurro, Juan Leone, and Julio Vergottini. Visit on Saturdays and Sundays to browse the crafts fair and watch the street performers.
Erected in 1936 to celebrate the city's 400th anniversary, El Obelisco (the Obelisk) is a city icon and a gathering place for cultural events, political demonstrations, and victory celebrations for local sports teams. You can't go up into the 220-foot tower and its base is fenced off to protect it from vandalism but it's still worth a gander.
Stop by the city's oldest and most elegant cemetery, the Cementerio de la Recoleta (Recoleta Cemetery). Nearly 15 acres in size and graced with elaborate marble mausoleums, the remains of former presidents, Nobel Prize winners, and even Eva Perón rest here.
The weekend Feria de Mataderos (Fair of the Mataderos), situated in front of the Mercado Nacional de Hacienda, is a great place to browse traditional handicrafts and tools and instruments used by Argentina's cowboys, the gauchos. The fair is open on Saturdays during summer months (February and March) and Sundays year round, except in January when the fair is closed. A typical Sunday at the fair attracts about 5,000 people.
If only to marvel at it from the outside, be sure to check out the Edificio Kavanagh (the Kavanagh Building), all 394 feet of it. This art deco/modernist hybrid apartment building was completed in 1936 and was once the tallest building in all of Latin America; it's a national historic monument.
Surrounded by government buildings, including the Casa Rosada (the Pink House) and the famous balcony from which Eva Perón made her famous speech on May Day 1952, the Plaza de Mayo (May Square) is BA's oldest. A nice place to sit and relax, visiting the Plaza de Mayo can also be quite emotional if you stop by on Thursdays between 3:30 and 4 p.m. when the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) solemnly march as they have for the past 30+ years to commemorate the disappearance of their sons and daughters (los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones) during Argentina's notorious Dirty War. The Plaza also contains the Pirámide de Mayo (the Pyramid of May), a nine-meter obelisk built in 1811 to mark the first anniversary of Argentina's revolution against Spanish colonial rule.
Stop by the Manzana de las Luces (the Block of the Lights, a name given to the area by a newspaper in 1822, referring to the many influential cultural, religious, and educational buildings and institutions built there), site of some of the oldest constructions in the city and its oldest church, the Iglesia de San Ignacio (the Church of Saint Ignatius), completed in 1722. Free tours are offered on Mondays at 1 p.m. of the Jesuit mission, the 18th-century tunnels beneath the block (used by smugglers and to transport supplies to defend the city), and its market.
