Buenos Aires: The Paris of the South

But the most haunting chapter of this plaza's history begins in nineteen seventy-six. That year, a military junta seized power in Argentina and embarked on what they called the 'Process of National Reorganisation' — el Proceso. Over the next seven years, they systematically kidnapped, tortured, and murdered an estimated thirty thousand people: political opponents, students, trade unionists, journalists, anyone they classified as subversive. Many were thrown from aircraft into the Río de la Plata. They were called 'the disappeared' — los desaparecidos — because the regime denied they existed.

In nineteen seventy-seven, the mothers of the disappeared began gathering here. Every Thursday at three-thirty in the afternoon, they came to the plaza — wearing white headscarves made from their children's diapers — and walked in silent circles around the pyramid at the centre, holding photographs of their missing sons and daughters. They were called the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. The regime called them 'las locas' — the mad ones. They were the bravest people in Argentina. They did this not once or twice but every single Thursday for decades. The tradition continued until two thousand and six.

Look down at the paving stones. The white circles painted on the plaza's surface trace the path the mothers walked. They are still repainted regularly. This is not a historical memorial. It is a living wound, and the city keeps it open on purpose.

The building itself is a mixture of styles and phases of construction, with the most recognisable element being the grand balcony on the north face — the balcony facing the plaza. This is the balcony of Argentine history. It is where presidents address the nation during moments of crisis and celebration. It is where Eva Perón stood.

Evita — María Eva Duarte de Perón, second wife of President Juan Domingo Perón — addressed crowds from this balcony in the nineteen forties and fifties during the height of Peronism. The images are extraordinary: Evita in white, arms raised, the plaza below her packed with hundreds of thousands of workers and supporters, the descamisados — the shirtless ones — who adored her. She was working-class herself, illegitimate, from the provinces, and she became the most powerful woman in Argentina's history while simultaneously being despised by the oligarchy with a ferocity that has never quite faded.

She died in nineteen fifty-two at the age of thirty-three, from cervical cancer. She had been ill for more than a year but continued working until she could not stand. The public grief was extraordinary — thousands queued for hours to pass her coffin. What happened to her body after death became one of the strangest stories in the history of corpse politics: her embalmed body was moved five times over the following two decades, was stolen by a military officer after a coup, was hidden in Milan, Italy, for sixteen years under a false name on a false grave, was returned to her husband Juan Perón (by then living in exile in Spain) in nineteen seventy-one, and finally returned to Argentina in nineteen seventy-four. She now rests in the Recoleta Cemetery, which is where this tour ends.

Look at the buildings as you walk. They are a catalogue of the architectural ambitions of the late nineteenth century: Beaux-Arts palaces with carved stone facades and mansard roofs; Art Nouveau buildings with organic ironwork and ceramic decoration; Spanish Renaissance revival with ornate towers; French Second Empire with the characteristic curved rooflines. The people who built these buildings were the new Argentine oligarchy — the cattle barons and wheat exporters who were making Buenos Aires one of the wealthiest cities in the world by nineteen hundred. Argentina's beef and grain were feeding Europe, and the profits were being poured into architecture on the Avenida de Mayo.

In nineteen thirteen Buenos Aires opened its underground railway — the Subte — the first metro system in Latin America, and still the oldest continuously operating metro south of the equator. Line A runs beneath this avenue. The original rolling stock, wooden carriages from Belgium, ran on this line until two thousand and thirteen — one hundred years of the same cars, finally retired. The replacements are modern and air-conditioned and considerably less interesting.

The avenue today is not as fashionable as it once was. Some of the grand buildings are in need of repair. The cafés that were once filled with journalists and politicians are quieter. But the bones are extraordinary, and on a clear day, with the late afternoon sun catching the stone facades, the Avenida de Mayo delivers exactly what it was designed to deliver: the sensation of being in a great European capital, in a city that built itself through sheer force of will at the end of the nineteenth century.

From the eighteen eighties onward, the Tortoni was the gathering place for the Argentine intellectual and artistic elite. Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest writer Argentina produced, came here regularly — he lived nearby and was a fixture in the back rooms. Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet and playwright, visited Buenos Aires in nineteen thirty-three and nineteen thirty-four and drank here. Albert Einstein visited Buenos Aires in nineteen twenty-five on a lecture tour and came to the Tortoni. The walls are covered with photographs of everyone who has ever sat here, and the photographs are worth more time than most museums.

In the basement, tango was performed for private audiences — not the show-tango of tourist venues but the real thing, improvised, intimate, scandalous to respectable society. The basement still hosts performances. They are now perfectly legitimate and somewhat expensive, which would have horrified the original audiences.

The café is extremely touristy, and you should not let that put you off. It is also genuinely functioning as a café, and the coffee is good, and the food is correct. Order a submarino — a piece of dark chocolate dropped into a glass of hot milk, which you stir until it dissolves. It is the classic Argentine hot chocolate and it is exactly what you want on a cool Buenos Aires morning. Order medialunas as well — the Argentine croissant, slightly sweeter and smaller than the French version, made with lard in the traditional recipe. Sit at a marble table. Look at the photographs on the walls. Read the plaque near the entrance. This room has earned its reputation.

The architecture is Beaux-Arts with a dome modelled explicitly on the United States Capitol in Washington — itself modelled on Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, so the genealogy of domes here reaches back to the Renaissance. The building's scale is extraordinary: the central hall is vast, the committee rooms are decorated with carved wood and painted ceilings, the library contains hundreds of thousands of volumes.

In front of the building is the Plaza del Congreso, and in the centre of that plaza, set into the pavement, is a small bronze marker. This is 'Kilómetro Cero' — Kilometre Zero — the point from which all road distances in Argentina are officially measured. Buenos Aires is not merely the capital of Argentina. It is, in this sense, the centre of everything: all distances radiate outward from this spot to Ushuaia in the south, to the Bolivian border in the north, to Mendoza at the foot of the Andes in the west. Stand on it for a moment. Then look back down the Avenida de Mayo to the pink tower of the Casa Rosada in the distance. This is the axis of Argentine democracy, built at enormous cost, serving a republic that has been interrupted more than once — coups in nineteen thirty, nineteen forty-three, nineteen fifty-five, nineteen sixty-two, nineteen sixty-six, nineteen seventy-six — but which has survived, and which continues to fill this building with elected representatives arguing loudly about everything.

In eighteen seventy-one, yellow fever arrived in Buenos Aires and did not leave. The epidemic killed forty-five thousand people — approximately eight percent of the city's total population at the time. The wealthy families of San Telmo fled north as fast as they could to higher, healthier ground, establishing what became Palermo and Recoleta. The houses they abandoned — many of them large colonial mansions with interior courtyards — were taken over by the waves of Italian and Spanish immigrants who were arriving in Buenos Aires in their hundreds of thousands. A single large house would be subdivided: the courtyard filled with temporary structures, each room occupied by an entire family, shared kitchens and bathrooms serving dozens of people. These were the conventillos — the tenement boarding houses — and they became the crucible in which the Tango was born.

The Tango did not emerge from polite society. It emerged from here: from the courtyard music sessions where Afro-Argentine candombe rhythms mixed with Cuban habanera, with Italian tarantella, with Polish polka, with the longing of immigrants who had left everything behind and found themselves crowded into a courtyard in a foreign city, playing music to make sense of where they were. The dance was close, sensual, improvised, and it was considered obscene by the middle classes. Pope Pius X condemned it in nineteen thirteen. Then the Parisians discovered it and went mad for it, and suddenly Tango was fashionable worldwide, and the Argentine middle classes decided they had loved it all along.

Every Sunday, Defensa Street closes to traffic for the Feria de San Pedro Telmo — the San Telmo antiques market — which spreads through the entire neighbourhood, with vendors selling antiques, vintage clothing, silver, leather, records, books, and everything else. It is one of the great street markets of South America.

What you find inside now is a mixture of the original market functions and newer uses that have moved in over the decades. There are still butchers and produce vendors selling to local residents. Alongside them: antique dealers with cases of silver and vintage jewellery; traders selling vintage vinyl records and old photographs; coffee bars and food stalls producing excellent food; tango performers who materialize between the tables and dance between customers. The collision of commerce and culture and tourism and genuine neighbourhood life is handled here with more grace than you might expect.

Outside the market, in the surrounding blocks, is where Buenos Aires street art reaches its highest concentration. The murals cover entire building facades — four and five storeys of painted concrete, legal commissions and illegal pieces, work ranging from photorealistic portraiture to abstract geometry to political comment. Buenos Aires has been one of the world's great street art cities since the economic crisis of two thousand and one, when the collapse of the economy produced a generation of artists with nothing to lose and a lot of blank walls available. The tradition has continued and deepened. The blocks around the Mercado de San Telmo are the best place in the city to see it.

The story of the colours — and it is probably mostly legend, which does not make it less useful — is that the workers who built and maintained the ships could not afford proper house paint. So they painted their corrugated iron homes with whatever was left over from the ships: deck paint, hull paint, whatever colour happened to be available. The result was polychromatic by accident, one house yellow, the next red, the next blue, creating the street that became known as Caminito — 'little path' — which is the name of a tango song written by Juan de Dios Filiberto in nineteen twenty-six about the Riachuelo streets of his childhood.

Caminito is now, unambiguously, a tourist attraction. The tango dancers in the doorways are there for the photographs. The prices in the restaurants are priced for visitors. This is all true, and you should know it, and you should go anyway, because the colours are genuinely extraordinary and the neighbourhood is a real neighbourhood where people live in those colourful houses. Walk through it and then walk a block or two off the main street and you find the actual La Boca — quieter, still colourful, somewhat broken, deeply Argentine.

Six hundred metres from Caminito is La Bombonera — the Estadio Alberto J. Armando, home of Club Atlético Boca Juniors. Boca Juniors was founded in nineteen oh five by the same Genoese immigrant community. They are, by most measures, the most supported football club in Argentina and one of the most famous clubs in the world. When Boca Juniors play at home, the entire neighbourhood vibrates. The stadium shakes. It is considered one of the most intimidating football grounds on earth. Maradona played here. Riquelme played here. If you are here on a match day, you will know it.

The centrepiece of Puerto Madero is the Puente de la Mujer — the Woman's Bridge — completed in two thousand and one and designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who has made a career of designing bridges that look like they are doing something impossible. The Puente de la Mujer is a tilting pedestrian bridge: a single white mast leaning at an angle over the dock basin, with suspension cables running to a white walkway below. The design is said to represent a tango couple — one figure dipping, one figure leaning. Whether or not you see the tango in it, the bridge is a beautiful object, and it has become one of the iconic images of the modern city.

Behind the converted warehouses, stretching south along the river, is the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur — the Southern Coastal Ecological Reserve. This is a nature reserve of several hundred hectares that grew up spontaneously on reclaimed land — earth that had been dumped here to extend the shoreline, left unmanaged, and colonised by wildflowers, grasses, trees, and eventually birds. It now hosts over two hundred bird species and is one of the best birdwatching sites within any major city in the world. It is also a favourite running and cycling destination for porteños — the residents of Buenos Aires, so called because they live at the port. The reserve is free to enter and is open most days. It is one of those accidental pieces of rewilded urban land that turns out to be more valuable than anything planned.

The most visited grave in the cemetery — and one of the most visited graves in the world — is that of Eva María Duarte de Perón. The Duarte family vault is plain by Recoleta standards: dark polished marble, modest in scale, a small plaque. It is usually covered with fresh flowers. The people who come to leave flowers here are not, for the most part, tourists. They are Argentines. They are workers, and old people, and young people who were born decades after her death and who nonetheless feel something when they stand here. The polarisation she produced in life has not entirely dissolved in death — she is still adored and still despised, but the adorers are more numerous and more devoted.

Also buried here are several Argentine presidents; the parents of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who grew up in Buenos Aires and became Pope Francis in twenty thirteen; and Rufina Cambaceres, who died — or appeared to die — in eighteen ninety-two at the age of nineteen. She was buried in the family vault. When the vault was later opened, the marks of fingernails were found on the interior of the coffin lid. She had been buried alive. Whether she woke in the vault, or whether she was buried in a cataleptic state and woke briefly in the coffin, is not known. What is known is that her mausoleum now has a bronze sculpture on its facade of a young woman in a dress, one hand raised, pushing open a door. She is depicted in the act of emerging. It is one of the most quietly devastating monuments in the cemetery, and it is worth finding.

Take your time here. The cemetery rewards wandering. Look at the inscriptions, the photographs, the architectural details. The wealthy of Buenos Aires for two hundred years are buried in these few acres, and the accumulated weight of ambition and grief and pride is extraordinary. This is where the tour ends — in a city that Buenos Aires built to contain its dead, which tells you as much about Buenos Aires as anything else on this walk.