The 10 Most Emblematic Streets of Buenos Aires (and How to Walk Them)

Buenos Aires does not have one monument you photograph and leave. It is a city you read at street level, and its character is spread along a handful of avenues and one or two hundred-metre alleys. Some are grand, some are shabby, one is barely a block long. Between them they hold the tango, the theatres, the antiques, the leather, the palaces and the bookshops that stay open past midnight.

These are the ten, with what is actually on each one, what is worth your time and what is not, and — at the end — how to fit them into two or three days on foot rather than chasing them across the map.

Written by the Buenos Aires team at 01Argentina Travel Agency, who walk these streets rather more often than they would like.

1. Avenida 9 de Julio — the widest avenue in the world

It is not a street you stroll. It is a street you cross, usually in two goes, and that is the point of it. At roughly 110 metres across its central span — about 140 if you count the two service streets that flank it, Cerrito and Carlos Pellegrini — it holds the Guinness record for the widest avenue on earth. Sixteen lanes of traffic, plus landscaped medians, occupying what used to be an entire city block.

It runs about three kilometres from Constitución in the south to Retiro in the north, and construction began in 1935 — a demolition project so large that one stubborn building, the Casa Elortondo, still stands marooned in the middle of it because the owner refused to sell. At the crossing with Corrientes stands the Obelisco, put up in 1936 for the city’s four-hundredth anniversary and now the place Argentines gather whenever the national team wins anything.

Practical note: allow two or three changes of the lights to get across, and do not try it diagonally. The best view is from the pedestrian crossing at Corrientes looking north, late afternoon, with the light behind you.

2. Avenida de Mayo — the most European kilometre in the city

Cut through the old city at the end of the nineteenth century to connect the Casa Rosada with the National Congress, Avenida de Mayo was deliberately built to look like Madrid, and it still does. Spanish immigrants filled it with cafés, newspapers and Art Nouveau facades, and enough of them survive that walking it feels like stepping sideways into another continent.

Three things to stop for. Café Tortoni, open since 1858 and the oldest café in the country — expect a queue, and go for the room rather than the coffee. Los 36 Billares, from 1894, still with its billiard tables downstairs. And Palacio Barolo, finished in 1923, which is the strangest building in Buenos Aires: it was designed around Dante’s Divine Comedy, with twenty-two floors for the poem’s twenty-two stanzas per canto, a hundred metres of height for its hundred cantos, hell in the basement, purgatory in the middle and a lighthouse at the top for paradise. It was the tallest building in South America until the Kavanagh overtook it in 1936, and you can go up.

Underneath your feet runs Line A of the subte, opened in 1913 — the first underground railway in Latin America and in the entire southern hemisphere. Ride one stop just to say you did.

3. Avenida Alvear — seven blocks of the belle époque

Seven blocks between Recoleta and Retiro, and the most expensive ground in Argentina. When the wealthy families of the early twentieth century moved north after the yellow fever epidemics emptied the south of the city, this is where they built — French-style palaces, one after another, most of which are now embassies, private clubs or hotels.

The Alvear Palace Hotel has been running since 1932. The Palacio Duhau and the Nunciatura Apostólica are both worth slowing down for. It takes twenty minutes end to end and it is the best short walk in the city if you want to understand why Buenos Aires was once one of the richest cities on earth. Combine it with the Recoleta Cemetery, which is two minutes away.

4. Avenida del Libertador — the green axis north

The long one. It runs north from Retiro parallel to the river and simply keeps going, through Palermo and Belgrano and out of the city entirely, eventually reaching the delta town of Tigre some thirty kilometres later.

What is on it: the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Museo de Arte Decorativo, the Bosques de Palermo with its rose garden and lakes, the Hipódromo, the Monumento de los Españoles, and a run of apartment buildings with the best river views in the city. This is not a walking street either — it is too long. Take it as the spine of an afternoon by taxi or on a tour, stopping at two or three points.

5. Calle Florida — the famous one, with an honest warning

Pedestrianised for over a century and for decades the most fashionable shopping street in South America. It is still the most famous, and it is still worth walking once, but let us be straight with you: Florida is not what the guidebooks describe. A good part of it is now discount shops, and you will be approached constantly by arbolitos calling out “cambio, cambio” — the informal money changers. They are a nuisance rather than a danger, but nobody warns visitors and the surprise is unpleasant.

What genuinely justifies the walk is Galerías Pacífico. The building went up in 1889 as a copy of the Bon Marché in Paris, and in 1946 five of Argentina’s most important painters — Berni, Castagnino, Spilimbergo, Colmeiro and Urruchúa — covered its central dome with murals. Walk in, look up, and you have seen one of the great interiors in the city. The Centro Cultural Borges is upstairs in the same building.

And one correction that matters, because it appears in almost every list of this kind: the Harrods at Florida 877 is closed. It opened in 1912 as the only overseas branch the London store ever had, and it shut its doors in 1998 after a long legal dispute and Argentina’s economic troubles. The building is still standing and still magnificent, and it is worth a look from the pavement — but you cannot go shopping in it, and no amount of reopening announcements over the years has changed that.

6. Calle Murillo — where the leather actually is

Not beautiful, not historic, and the most useful street on this list if you came to Argentina for a leather jacket. Between the 500 and 700 blocks in Villa Crespo there are more than fifty shops and small factories doing nothing but leather — jackets, bags, belts, gloves — many of them selling directly from the workshop behind the counter.

Prices are lower than in Recoleta and the quality is often better, because you are buying from the people who made the thing. Bargaining is normal. Bring cash. And if you intend to reclaim the VAT afterwards, ask the shop whether they are inside the Tax Free scheme before you pay — not every one of them is, and the paperwork has to be issued at the moment of the sale.

7. Avenida Boedo — the tango that is not for tourists

Boedo is where tango came from rather than where it is performed for visitors, and the difference is the whole reason to go. In the 1920s and 30s this was the working-class, left-leaning literary neighbourhood — the Boedo group of writers set themselves against the more refined Florida group, which is one of the better literary feuds in Argentine history.

The corner of San Juan and Boedo is a National Historic Site, because it is the corner Homero Manzi wrote about in Sur, one of the most loved tangos ever written. The café on that corner is now the Esquina Homero Manzi and it does run a tango show, though the neighbourhood itself — its old bars, its pizzerias, its bookshops — is the real attraction. This is a stop for a second or third visit to Buenos Aires, or for a traveller who wants the city rather than the postcard.

8. Avenida Corrientes — the street that never sleeps

If you only walk one avenue at night, walk this one. Corrientes is the theatre district, and the density is extraordinary: dozens of stages within a few blocks, from the grand Teatro Gran Rex and Teatro Ópera to tiny independent rooms above shops. Around them sit the bookshops that stay open past midnight, the second-hand record stalls, and the pizzerias that are institutions in their own right — Güerrín and Las Cuartetas among them, where the pizza is eaten standing at the counter.

Buenos Aires eats late and goes out later. A theatre performance at ten followed by pizza at midnight is not eccentric here; it is a Wednesday. Corrientes is also where the Obelisco stands, at the crossing with 9 de Julio, which makes it the easiest of these ten streets to find.

9. Calle Defensa — San Telmo, and why Sunday matters

Defensa runs south through San Telmo, the oldest surviving neighbourhood in the city, and it is cobbled, low-built and full of antique dealers. On any weekday it is a pleasant hour: colonial doorways, the Mercado de San Telmo from 1897 with its wrought-iron roof and its food stalls, churches, and Parque Lezama at the southern end, where the city was supposedly founded the first time.

On Sunday it is something else entirely. The Feria de San Telmo takes over Defensa for more than ten blocks, from Plaza de Mayo down to Plaza Dorrego, with hundreds of stalls, street tango in the plaza and a crowd that fills the road end to end. If you have one Sunday in Buenos Aires, this is what to do with the morning. If your only free day is a Tuesday, come anyway — but know that you are seeing the quiet version.

10. Caminito — a hundred metres, and read the note

The most photographed street in Argentina is about a hundred metres long. Caminito, in La Boca, is a former railway cutting turned into an open-air museum street in 1959 at the initiative of the painter Benito Quinquela Martín, who grew up in the neighbourhood. The famous colours come from the conventillos, the tenements where immigrant families lived, painted with whatever leftover marine paint could be scrounged from the shipyards — which is why no two panels match.

It is unashamedly touristy — tango dancers posing for tips, restaurants with menus in four languages — and it is still worth going, because there is nothing else that looks like it. The Fundación Proa and the Museo Quinquela Martín are both within a few blocks and both excellent, and La Bombonera, Boca Juniors’ stadium, is round the corner.

The note, and we would rather give it to you here: stay inside the few blocks around Caminito, Proa and the stadium. La Boca outside that perimeter is a working-class neighbourhood that is not set up for wandering tourists, and the advice from every local you ask will be the same. Arrive by taxi, by remise or on a tour rather than walking in from a distance, and do not go after dark. It is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to go the sensible way.

Three more that belong on the list

Ten is a round number, not a complete one. Three others earn their place:

• The streets of Palermo Soho — Honduras, Gurruchaga, El Salvador and the rest of the grid around Plaza Serrano. Low houses, designers, street art, and the best concentration of restaurants in the city. This is where Buenos Aires actually goes out.
• Avenida Santa Fe — the real shopping street, the one porteños use instead of Florida. Kilometres of it, and a good deal more pleasant.
• The docks of Puerto Madero — the restored brick warehouses along the water, the Puente de la Mujer, and the only district in the city where every street is named after a woman.

How to walk them without wasting days

Scattered across a map these ten look like a week’s work. They are not. They cluster into three half-days:

1. The centre, one morning on foot. Start at Plaza de Mayo, walk Avenida de Mayo to Congreso, come back, cross 9 de Julio at the Obelisco, then Corrientes and Florida. That is four of the ten in about three hours, with a stop at Tortoni.
2. South, ideally a Sunday. Defensa and San Telmo in the morning while the fair is on, then Caminito and La Boca after lunch. Two of the ten, plus the best market day in the city.
3. North, one afternoon. Alvear and the Recoleta Cemetery on foot, then Libertador north through Palermo, finishing with dinner in Palermo Soho. Two more, and the city’s best evening.

That leaves Murillo, which is a targeted trip if you want leather, and Boedo, which is for people coming back. Three days in Buenos Aires covers this comfortably. Two covers most of it. One means choosing the centre and San Telmo and accepting that you missed the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Is Harrods in Buenos Aires open?

No. The Harrods at Florida 877 opened in 1912 — the only branch the London store ever had outside Britain — and closed in 1998. The building still stands and is occasionally used for exhibitions or events, but it has not operated as a department store for over twenty-five years, despite repeated announcements that it would reopen.

Which street should I walk first?

Avenida de Mayo, starting from Plaza de Mayo. It gives you the Casa Rosada, the Cabildo, Café Tortoni and Palacio Barolo in one straight line, it is short, and it orients you for everything else. Corrientes and 9 de Julio are one block away when you finish.

Is Caminito and La Boca safe?

The Caminito area itself is busy, policed and visited by thousands of people daily. The surrounding neighbourhood is not a tourist area. Arrive by taxi or on a tour rather than walking in, stay within the few blocks around Caminito, Fundación Proa and La Bombonera, and do not go after dark. Handled that way it is straightforward, and it is what locals do themselves.

When is the San Telmo fair?

Sundays, along Calle Defensa, running roughly from Plaza de Mayo down to Plaza Dorrego, through the middle of the day. If your itinerary has any flexibility at all, it is worth arranging your free Sunday around it.

Can you go inside Palacio Barolo?

Yes. It runs guided visits that take you up through the building to the lighthouse at the top, and the view over Avenida de Mayo towards Congreso is one of the best in the city. Times and availability change, so it is worth checking before you turn up.

Where should I buy leather in Buenos Aires?

Calle Murillo in Villa Crespo, between the 500 and 700 blocks — more than fifty workshops and shops in a few streets, generally cheaper and better made than the tourist-facing shops in the centre. Ask about the Tax Free scheme before paying if you intend to reclaim the VAT on departure.

How many days do I need in Buenos Aires?

Three full days is the honest answer for a first visit: one for the centre, one for the south, one for the north and an evening out. Four if you want a day trip to Tigre or to the pampas, or a tango show without rushing dinner. Two is possible and you will feel it.

Seeing them with someone who knows the city

Every one of these streets can be walked alone, and we would never pretend otherwise. What a guide adds is the half of the story that is not visible: which door in Avenida de Mayo is worth pushing open, which corner in Boedo the tango was written about, why the colours in Caminito are the colours they are, and which block of Florida to skip. It also solves La Boca, Tigre and the pampas, which are the three places where getting there is the awkward part.