Buenos Aires City for the Senses

From the pink Casa Rosada to the colourful streets of La Boca, Natasha Dragun gives us a tour of vibrant Buenos Aires.

Argentina’s hedonistic capital is a city where the locals weep over soccer games, show off their whip-crack tango moves at every opportunity and sip malbec (with a side of meat) late into the night. Buenos Aires excites all the senses, but it’s particularly easy on the eyes.

You won’t know where to look in La Boca, a neighbourhood so colourful it appears to have been kissed by a rainbow. The vibrant dwellings here hold the history of Buenos Aires’ working class immigrants, many of whom arrived from Italy in the early 1800s. While some buildings are still residences, others have been transformed into boutiques and lively tango bars – this is, after all, where the high-octane dance form was born. The area is also the inspiration behind the famous tango Caminito, which gives its name to La Boca’s main street, a lively pedestrian strip that is part alfresco art gallery and part cultural hub.

Across the city, the colour continues at Casa Rosada (‘Pink House’, officially known as Government House), the office of the President of Argentina. The rose-hued mansion cuts a dramatic form over Buenos Aires’ main square, Plaza de Mayo, though things are a little more subdued inside, where visitors can learn about its history and some of the landmark decisions that have been made on these very grounds. If it looks familiar, that’s because Casa Rosada’s balcony has been immortalised for decades – it’s here that Eva Peron famously addressed throngs of impassioned supporters.

On the opposite side of the Plaza de Mayo lies another architectural marvel, the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral. While it was completed in 1827, numerous rebuilds and additions mean that the current façade is a 19th-century neoclassical wonder, a wedding cake of layers with naves, domes and pillars.

The cavernous interior, meanwhile, is all baroque and rococo flourishes, with intricate frescoes and Venetian-style mosaics. It’s a pilgrimage site for locals, who come here to pay respect to General Jose de San Martin (who led Argentina to independence from Spanish rule) at his mausoleum. This slice of Argentinian history is brought into focus once again at the nearby Cabildo, a glorious 18th-century town hall – the city’s first – today housing a museum highlighting the country’s revolution of May 1810.

Nearby is the heaving thoroughfare that is Avenida 9 de Julio, a three-kilometre-long strip – the widest of its kind in the world, with 12 lanes – that unites fountains and monuments, theatres and embassies, street performers and demonstrators. Modelled on Paris’ Champs Elysees, but made twice as wide, this is the street that never sleeps. Taking to the road here is as thrilling as it is educational, offering a front-row seat to one of the most vibrant cities in South America.