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Wow – where do I begin with Buenos Aires? It is an old city filled with European buildings, cobblestoned streets, suburbs bursting with personality, ghettos and a buzzing nightlife.
Our first couple of days were spent in and around the busy city that is home to 15 million people – known locally as
porteños - and to start off with I struggled to find the right words to describe how I found it...big, busy, majestic, imposing but somewhat confused all at the same time.
The buildings are ridiculously beautiful and every block offers another structure equally as spectacular as the last…(more on this later).
We spent a couple of days exploring the city centre (or as much as we could after walking for hours each day) and then ventured out to some barrios (neighbourhoods) which are well known among all the tourists that visit this big city.
I found this description of San Telmo online and I don’t think I could have put it better myself:
San Telmo has it all: history; beauty; ugliness; life; decay; great food; tango, and antique shops.
We spent our time here walking every cobblestoned street
we could find and became entranced by the street art that lined every wall of every street. It was surreal to see these beautiful old buildings covered in art, and sometimes just graffiti, but it seemed to suit this little suburb that had quite a charm to it.
Right next door to San Telmo is La Boca. A popular tourist destination due to two things: 1) a street of only 100m that is lined with colourful buildings known as Caminito and 2) it is home to the world famous Boca Juniors soccer team (apparently…)
We had a lovely afternoon walking the streets lined with colourful restaurants each with waiters beckoning you to come in, street music filling the air, markets, tourists and tango dancers. We decided to grab a second lunch here after spotting an Asado (Argentina’s BBQ) – the smell and look of the searing meat over the charcoals was too hard to resist. Argentina is known for its meat and it definitely didn’t disappoint! La Boca was a lively little place and again, a barrio bursting with its own personality.
After a few days exploring
Buenos Aires we decided to take the opportunity to cross the Rio de la Plata (translates to ‘Silver River’) which separates Argentina and Uruguay and add another stamp to our passports.
After only a one hour ferry ride we arrived in Uruguay - a country of only 3 million people and of that, 1.3 million live in the capital city – Montevideo. Here we explored the city during a walking tour which is a great way to learn the history of where you are, the local customs and traditions, the political situation (past and present) and to get some great local information on places to go, see, eat and drink.
Whilst here, Yanna and I were walking the main street of the city when we bumped into a German friend of ours that Clair and I had camped with back in El Chalten, Argentina over 2 weeks earlier. He had just arrived in the city and was looking for his hostel which also turned out to be the one we were staying in also.
This wasn’t the first time we had ran into someone that we had already met somewhere along our travels but in a completely
different city or country. Previously in BA we had ran into a Spaniard in a random back street of the city who we had met in Valdivia, Chile at the start of April and then when we returned to BA after Uruguay we bumped into an Aussie that Yanna and I had met in Santiago during our first week of travelling. It’s amazing how big and how small the world can feel at the same time.
We headed back to BA after only 5 days in Uruguay (although we all could have happily stayed longer) and this time stayed in the barrio Palermo – a beautiful part of town that is quite often described as the trendy ‘hipster’ side of BA and is the biggest barrio by size in the city. It was by far the nicest neighbourhood we had visited in the city and we were even fortunate enough to find a coffee shop that made decent expresso coffee and that even went as far as doing latte art – a first since having left Australia! We had only had 4 days left in the big city so we made every minute count.
My favourite looking building in BA
Turned out to be a Naval Office of some sortOn one of the days we spent 4.5 hours on a walking tour which took us through what felt like most part of the city, however at the end of the tour our guide informed us that we had only covered around 15% of the city! Our guide was a very prideful Argentine with a wealth of knowledge on the history of his beloved city and countless of recommendations that would see you staying in the city for months just to get through them all.
During the tour our guide explained (as simply as possible) the history of the city which gave me a much better understanding of why the city has such an eclectic collection of architecture and why it was really hard to put into words what the essence of the city was. I will try to give you a little bit of an idea of what we learnt:
During the 1800’s the city was ruled by very very wealthy families who owned land that was bigger than the size of some European countries. They decided that the Spanish/Colonial feel of the city was ‘barbaric’ and decided that to be ‘civilised’ the city needed a European
influence. These families went about building Buenos Aires to what it is today – a Wonderland of Architecture as our guide poetically put it. Our guide drew our attention to the buildings at one particular intersection and each corner told a different story, there was a German building, a French palace, an American theatre and even a Jewish Mosque all within a 360 degree view. He said this was not an uncommon scenario around the city.
He also went onto explain that during the period 1880-1930, whilst the new city was being built, the rich families decided to open up immigration offices in Europe and allowed anyone to call BA home. As a result, during this period 50% of the population were immigrants, and of those, 25% were Italian. The guide explained that as a result of this, BA which he described as a ‘City of Copies’ (as all the buildings are all of European influence and not many colonial influences are left) and the amount of people that hadn’t been born in the city but now lived there, many people did and still do struggle to find an identity due to the mix of influences.
There is
a whole lot more to this story of cause but this little bit of history really helped me to understand the city a bit more. I had been confused after finding a South American city covered in beautiful European buildings and not knowing why.
Before arriving in BA we had heard that it can be quite a dangerous city for tourists. In the hostels we heard stories of people being robbed at knife point and even when we were out on the streets and the girls had their cameras out we literally had strangers come up to us and explain to us to put them out of sight as thieves were ever present and we would be easy targets.
Safety was always in the back of our minds as we travelled around BA - we watched each other's back packs as we moved through the crowds, often even carrying them on our fronts, looped the tags to our zips into the bag itself so they were harder to access and even caught taxis to avoid certain areas we had been told about.
The locals are realistic about the potential for crime but it doesn't prevent you from
enjoying everything the city has to offer - it's filled with passionate locals, an immense array of diverse architecture that you won't see anywhere else in the world and it literally offers something for everyone.
Although I am happy to say goodbye to BA to head to a quieter part of the country I really enjoyed our stay and would recommend it to everyone – there is good reason for it to be the most visited city in South America.
For now, I will leave it there. I will write again soon.
From Argentina
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