BA Street Art

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The Buenos Aires Street Arttour takes you around the city giving you an up-close introduction to the street art scene, our guide an English guy called Matt was so enthusiastic for the art and knew where to find all the best murals and graffiti pieces. He’d previously co-written a book on South American street art and has a wealth of knowledge on all things graffiti.

Matt leads us around the neighbourhoods of Palermo and Colegiales as he explains about the history of street art in Argentina - When the military dictatorship fell in the 80’s and the constraints on free expression were lifted graffiti bloomed- we see colours exploding and animals leaping out from the walls as wepass by, in addition to animals every other picture imaginable will appear somewhere in the city if you look hard enough, from the quirky and whimsical to the political statements. A young democracy expressing themselves – the fun stand alongside, art for art’s sake, the angry and the colourful coexist in the community both having their place as expression.



In Argentina and in particular BA, graffiti is everywhere and has been total embraced as part of the community, the makeup of the city. It’s very different to at home, graffiti is not seen as petty vandalism, well not by all. There are still laws about where you can and cannot paint, and there’s a big difference between the tags and slogans of the ‘vandlismo’ sprayed across trains and on every available wall space and the 6foot plus street art created with meaning.

The different styles are astounding, from tags or vandalsimo, through to paintings, every type of medium and paint material is used. Around the edge of the parkland paintings are technically allowed on public buildings, a lot of private homeowners are happy to host the art on their walls, not all artists keep it legal - some will knock and ask permission before painting, some won’t.

An amazing tour, a great way to spend 3hours in BA and something I recommend highly.

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