Palermo & Palermo Soho

Palermo is Buenos Aires' largest and most diverse neighbourhood — a sprawling barrio that contains the city's biggest park, its best restaurants, its trendiest boutiques, and a nightlife scene that starts after midnight and continues until the sun comes up. Palermo Soho, the grid of streets around Plaza Serrano (officially Plaza Cortázar), is the creative hub — cobblestone streets lined with designer shops, street art, cocktail bars, and the kind of restaurants that put Buenos Aires on the global food map.

The restaurant scene in Palermo Soho has made Buenos Aires a culinary destination: Don Julio (consistently ranked among the best steakhouses in the world), Proper (contemporary Argentine tasting menu), and dozens of parrillas, wine bars, and empanada shops that represent the full range of Argentine cooking. The wine bars deserve special mention — Argentina's Malbec revolution happened on these streets, and the bars that pour by the glass from boutique Mendoza producers offer one of the best wine experiences outside the actual wine regions.

Palermo Hollywood, a few blocks north, is where the media companies, production studios, and nightclubs cluster, and the area around Godoy Cruz and Honduras streets becomes the city's after-hours district on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Palermo's parks — the Bosques de Palermo, the Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden — provide the green space, and the entire neighbourhood is connected by the kind of walkable, tree-lined streets that make Buenos Aires feel more like a European capital than a South American metropolis.