Avenida de Mayo

Avenida de Mayo is Buenos Aires' most architecturally significant street — a 1.3-kilometre boulevard connecting the Casa Rosada to the Congreso Nacional that was modelled on Madrid's Gran Vía and represents the peak of Argentine architectural ambition. Built in the 1890s by demolishing two blocks of colonial buildings to create a European-width avenue, it was the first thoroughfare in South America designed to rival the grand boulevards of Europe.

The architecture is a timeline of early 20th-century styles — Art Nouveau, Beaux-Arts, Neo-Gothic, and the eclectic combinations that architects produced when their clients said 'make it look European but bigger.' The Palacio Barolo, designed by Italian architect Mario Palanti and completed in 1923, is the avenue's most extraordinary building — a 100-metre tower inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, with the ground floors representing Hell, the middle floors Purgatory, and the upper floors Paradise, topped by a lighthouse whose beam was designed to be visible from Montevideo across the Río de la Plata.

Café Tortoni anchors the avenue's cultural life, but the surrounding blocks contain some of the best traditional cafés and restaurants in the city — places where the Spanish-Argentine heritage of the avenue (it was the centre of Buenos Aires' Spanish immigrant community) survives in the food, the conversation, and the unhurried pace of afternoon coffee. The Subte (metro) Line A, which runs beneath the avenue, was the first underground railway in South America when it opened in 1913, and riding it in the original Belgian-made carriages (recently replaced, though some survive as museum pieces) was itself a historical experience.