{"id":342,"date":"2012-10-01T15:43:43","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T18:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.01argentina.com\/travel\/?p=342"},"modified":"2026-08-26T18:10:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T21:10:42","slug":"the-10-most-emblematic-streets-of-buenos-aires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.01argentina.com\/travel\/the-10-most-emblematic-streets-of-buenos-aires\/","title":{"rendered":"The 10 Most Emblematic Streets of Buenos Aires (and How to Walk Them)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by the Buenos Aires team at 01Argentina Travel Agency, who walk these streets rather more often than they would like.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Avenida 9 de Julio — the widest avenue in the world<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It is not a street you stroll. It is a street you cross<\/em>, usually in two goes, and that is the point of it. At roughly 110 metres<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/strong>, put up in 1936 for the city’s four-hundredth anniversary and now the place Argentines gather whenever the national team wins anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The Obelisco, where 9 de Julio meets Corrientes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Practical note:<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Avenida de Mayo — the most European kilometre in the city<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Cut through the old city at the end of the nineteenth century to connect the Casa Rosada<\/strong> with the National Congress<\/strong>, Avenida de Mayo was deliberately built to look like Madrid, and it still does. Spanish immigrants filled it with caf\u00e9s, newspapers and Art Nouveau facades, and enough of them survive that walking it feels like stepping sideways into another continent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three things to stop for. Caf\u00e9 Tortoni<\/strong>, open since 1858 and the oldest caf\u00e9 in the country — expect a queue, and go for the room rather than the coffee. Los 36 Billares<\/strong>, from 1894, still with its billiard tables downstairs. And Palacio Barolo<\/strong>, finished in 1923, which is the strangest building in Buenos Aires: it was designed around Dante’s Divine Comedy<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

3. Avenida Alvear — seven blocks of the belle époque<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Alvear Palace Hotel<\/strong> has been running since 1932. The Palacio Duhau<\/strong> and the Nunciatura Apostólica<\/strong> 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<\/strong>, which is two minutes away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Avenida del Libertador — the green axis north<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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<\/strong> some thirty kilometres later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is on it: the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes<\/strong>, the Museo de Arte Decorativo<\/strong>, the Bosques de Palermo<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Calle Florida — the famous one, with an honest warning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/strong> A good part of it is now discount shops, and you will be approached constantly by arbolitos<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What genuinely justifies the walk is Galerías Pacífico<\/strong>. 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 Urruch\u00faa — 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<\/strong> is upstairs in the same building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And one correction that matters, because it appears in almost every list of this kind:<\/strong> the Harrods<\/strong> at Florida 877 is closed<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Calle Murillo — where the leather actually is<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> you pay — not every one of them is, and the paperwork has to be issued at the moment of the sale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. Avenida Boedo — the tango that is not for tourists<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The corner of San Juan and Boedo<\/strong> is a National Historic Site, because it is the corner Homero Manzi wrote about in Sur<\/em>, one of the most loved tangos ever written. The caf\u00e9 on that corner is now the Esquina Homero Manzi<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. Avenida Corrientes — the street that never sleeps<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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<\/strong> and Teatro Ópera<\/strong> 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<\/strong> and Las Cuartetas<\/strong> among them, where the pizza is eaten standing at the counter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. Calle Defensa — San Telmo, and why Sunday matters<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Defensa runs south through San Telmo<\/strong>, 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<\/strong> from 1897 with its wrought-iron roof and its food stalls, churches, and Parque Lezama<\/strong> at the southern end, where the city was supposedly founded the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Calle
Defensa, in San Telmo. On Sundays the whole street becomes a market.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On Sunday it is something else entirely.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10. Caminito — a hundred metres, and read the note<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The most photographed street in Argentina is about a hundred metres long. Caminito, in La Boca<\/strong>, is a former railway cutting turned into an open-air museum street in 1959 at the initiative of the painter Benito Quinquela Martín<\/strong>, who grew up in the neighbourhood. The famous colours come from the conventillos<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
Caminito. The colours came out of leftover shipyard paint.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/strong> and the Museo Quinquela Martín<\/strong> are both within a few blocks and both excellent, and La Bombonera<\/strong>, Boca Juniors’ stadium, is round the corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The note, and we would rather give it to you here:<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three more that belong on the list<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ten is a round number, not a complete one. Three others earn their place:<\/p>\n\n\n\n