Bosques de Palermo & Rose Garden

The Bosques de Palermo (Palermo Woods) is Buenos Aires' Central Park — a 400-hectare green space of lakes, gardens, and forested paths that wraps around the northern end of the city and provides the lungs that make Palermo liveable. The park was designed by French landscape architect Carlos Thays in the 1890s, who also designed most of Buenos Aires' other major green spaces, and his vision of a French-style park adapted to the Argentine climate has aged beautifully.

The Rosedal (Rose Garden) is the park's crown jewel — a manicured garden of over 18,000 rose bushes, a Grecian bridge, pergolas, and the kind of romantic landscaping that makes it the most popular location in the city for wedding photographs, Instagram sessions, and the Sunday afternoon paseo (stroll) that is an Argentine cultural institution. The rose garden is free, open daily, and is at its best in October-November (Argentine spring) when the roses bloom.

The park also contains the Japanese Garden (Jardín Japonés) — a 2.5-hectare garden with koi ponds, arched bridges, and a tea house built by the Japanese-Argentine community in 1967. The Planetario Galileo Galilei, a 1960s space-age structure surrounded by meteorites, sits at the park's southeastern edge. The lakes (artificially created in the 1890s) support paddle boats, runners circle the perimeter paths, and on weekends the park fills with the same mix of families, cyclists, mate-drinkers, and dog-walkers that fills every great urban park in the world.