🇦🇷 Argentina · Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is a city you live intensely: cosmopolitan and melancholy, European and Latin American at once, with the elegance of its stately avenues and the cheek of its immigrant neighborhoods. Capital of Argentina and one of the great cities of South America, the 'Queen of the Plata' wins you over with its mix of French-styled architecture, bookshops open until dawn, century-old cafés and an almost religious devotion to asado, football and tango. It is a city to walk without hurrying, letting yourself drift from one neighborhood to the next.
Every neighborhood is a world of its own. San Telmo keeps the colonial core with its cobbled streets, antique shops and the Sunday market along Defensa; La Boca bursts with color at Caminito, birthplace of tango and home of La Bombonera; Recoleta lays out French-styled palaces and its famous cemetery, an open-air museum where Eva Perón rests; and Palermo, the largest, combines parkland, gardens, the design district of the Soho and the best food scene. At the civic heart, the Plaza de Mayo brings together the Casa Rosada, the Cathedral and the Cabildo, the stage of Argentine history.
The pulse of the city also beats in its great icons: the Obelisco on Avenida 9 de Julio —one of the widest in the world—, the majestic Teatro Colón, one of the most important opera houses on the planet, Avenida Corrientes with its theaters, pizzerias and bookshops that never sleep, and modern Puerto Madero beside the river. And tango everywhere, declared part of the heritage of humanity: in the milongas, in the gala shows and in the couples dancing in the open air on Plaza Dorrego. Buenos Aires is, above all, an experience you feel.
Buenos Aires has the oddity of having been founded twice. The first founding was carried out by the adelantado Pedro de Mendoza on 2 February 1536, under the name Puerto de Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre, but the settlement did not prosper: hunger and resistance from the Querandí peoples forced it to be abandoned by around 1541. The definitive founding came on 11 June 1580, when Juan de Garay established the Ciudad de la Santísima Trinidad y Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires around what is now the Plaza de Mayo, distributed the land and created the Cabildo. The name refers to Nuestra Señora del Buen Aire (or Bonaria), a Marian devotion of Sardinian origin invoked by sailors for protection against storms at sea. Through the colonial period the city grew as a port, and in 1776 it gained importance when it was made capital of the newly created Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. Its character was forged in decisive episodes: the British Invasions of 1806 and 1807, driven back by the criollo militias, and the May Revolution of 1810, which began the road to independence. After decades of conflict between Buenos Aires and the provinces, the city was federalized in 1880 and declared Federal Capital of the Republic. Between the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, the great European wave of immigration —Italians, Spaniards and many other origins— turned Buenos Aires into a modern metropolis, with grand avenues, theaters and tango as its soundtrack. Since 1996 it has been an autonomous city with a government of its own. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Argentina's capital and its most emblematic city: the port Garay refounded in 1580, cradle of the May Revolution, mecca of immigration and of tango, federalized in 1880 and the stage of the great events of the twentieth century, today one of the great cultural metropolises of Latin America.
Read the history of Autonomous City of Buenos Aires →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Buenos Aires has the peculiarity of having been founded twice. The first founding took place on 2 February 1536, when the adelantado Pedro de Mendoza, leading a large Spanish expedition —fourteen ships and more than fifteen hundred crew who had sailed from Andalusia—, landed on the shore of the Río de la Plata and established the Puerto de Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre. It was the first European attempt to settle permanently in these lands at the far south of the continent.
The settlement, however, was short-lived and tragic. Hunger hit the fort hard, and resistance from the Querandí and other Indigenous peoples, fed up with the demands of the newcomers, made survival harder still. Mendoza himself, ill, set out to return to Spain and died at sea in 1537. The survivors gradually moved north, up the Paraná river, and by around 1541 the first Buenos Aires had been abandoned for good, while the colonizing effort concentrated on Asunción in Paraguay.
Barely any material trace of that first Buenos Aires remains —its exact location is still the subject of archaeological research—, but the episode left behind a name and a determination to hold a Spanish presence on the estuary that, decades later, another expedition would take up to found the city for good.
The name of the city does not refer, as is sometimes believed, to the purity of the local air, but to a religious devotion of sailors. 'Buenos Aires' comes from Nuestra Señora del Buen Aire —in Italian, Bonaria—, a Marian devotion whose shrine stands in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia. Mediterranean sailors invoked her as their protector against storms and the dangers of the sea, and the members of the expedition that reached the Río de la Plata placed their venture under that protection.
When Pedro de Mendoza founded the first settlement in 1536, he called it Puerto de Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre. Forty-four years later, Juan de Garay reused that same name for the definitive founding: Ciudad de la Santísima Trinidad y Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires. Over time, the long name was shortened in everyday use until only 'Buenos Aires' was left, and its inhabitants came to be known as 'porteños', people of the port.
The story of the Virgin of Bonaria and her miraculous arrival on the shores of Sardinia —according to legend, an image that survived a shipwreck in 1370 and floated to the island— is part of the city's founding narrative and explains why a metropolis on the banks of the Plata bears the name of a devotion born on a Mediterranean island.
The Buenos Aires that lasted was born on 11 June 1580, when Juan de Garay, setting out from Asunción in Paraguay with a handful of Spaniards and a large number of criollos and mestizos born in these lands, refounded the city on the bluffs above the Río de la Plata. He named it Ciudad de la Santísima Trinidad y Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires, recycling the name of Mendoza's failed founding.
Garay laid out the city according to Spanish rules: a grid of streets around a main square —today's Plaza de Mayo—, distributed the plots and the farm and ranch land among the settlers, and established the Cabildo, the local government institution. That founding act fixed the heart of the city where the Casa Rosada, the Cathedral and the Cabildo itself stand today, and set out a grid that can still be recognized in the old town.
For much of the colonial period, Buenos Aires was a modest village on the edge of things compared with the great centers of the viceroyalty of Peru, poorly supplied and given over to smuggling because it lay so far from the official routes. But its strategic position on the estuary, as the natural gateway to the South Atlantic, already held the seed of the importance it would take on two centuries later.
The fate of Buenos Aires changed in 1776, when King Carlos III created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata and chose the city as its capital. The new viceroyalty —covering what are now Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and part of Brazil— was meant to strengthen the Spanish presence against British and Portuguese advances in the South Atlantic. All at once the old smuggling village became the political and administrative head of an immense territory, and its port and its trade took on decisive importance.
Barely three decades later came a trial by fire. In 1806 and 1807, two British expeditions tried to seize the city: the so-called British Invasions. In the first, the troops of Colonel William Carr Beresford occupied Buenos Aires in June 1806, while viceroy Sobremonte fled; but the criollo militias, organized by Santiago de Liniers, achieved the 'Reconquest' of the city that same year. In 1807, a second and larger British offensive was driven back in the streets of the city in what became known as the 'Defense'. Those victories, won with almost no help from Spain, awoke in the criollos a new awareness of their own strength.
That spirit led to the May Revolution of 1810: on 25 May, at the Cabildo of Buenos Aires, the viceroy was removed and the Primera Junta, the first home-grown government, was formed —the first firm step toward independence, which would be formally declared in 1816. From then on the Plaza de Mayo was consecrated as the stage of Argentine political life above all others, where the great moments of the country's history have been celebrated and fought over.
Through the 19th century, the economic and demographic weight of Buenos Aires —owner of the country's only deep-water port— was a constant source of tension with the provinces and a cause of civil wars. The 'capital question' was only settled in 1880: after the defeat of the city's resistance led by governor Carlos Tejedor, the federalization of the city was passed into law, and on 6 December of that year it was officially declared Federal Capital of the Argentine Republic, separated from the province and placed under national jurisdiction.
That was when Buenos Aires went through its great transformation. Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, an enormous wave of immigration —above all Italian and Spanish, but from many other origins too— multiplied the population and gave the city its cosmopolitan character, its accent, its food and, out in the poor outskirts, that mixed musical genre that would become tango. In the tenements of San Telmo, La Boca and other working-class neighborhoods, the cultures that forged the porteño identity came together.
The elite, grown rich on the farm-export model, dreamed of a capital worthy of the great European cities. That is when the grand avenues appeared —Avenida de Mayo, 9 de Julio, Corrientes—, the French-styled palaces of Recoleta, the historic cafés such as the Tortoni and gems like the Teatro Colón, opened in 1908. This was the porteño Belle Époque, the period when Buenos Aires earned the nickname 'the Paris of South America'. That architectural and cultural legacy, added to the energy of its people, still defines the city, which since 1996 has been an autonomous city with a government of its own.