Guide from Buenos Aires·36 hours
36 Hours in Buenos Aires and an Exchange Rate to Match
A weekend planned around a currency that moves faster than the subte.
Any price printed in this guide will be wrong by the time you read it. That is not sloppiness, it is the exchange rate, and the correct response is to plan around categories rather than numbers: which meals are cheap in relative terms, which are not, and which are worth it either way.
Friday evening to Saturday
Arrive and do nothing ambitious. San Telmo on a Friday night costs almost nothing and gives you the register of the city. Saturday morning is Recoleta and the cemetery, which is free and takes longer than you think, then the Ateneo Grand Splendid because everyone goes and it earns it. Lunch at a parrilla is the meal to spend on. It is still cheaper than the equivalent anywhere in North America, and the difference in quality is not close.
Sunday
The San Telmo market fills eleven blocks and you will not get through it. Go early, buy the leather thing you are going to buy, and be at La Boca by two. Caminito is a tourist set piece and worth exactly forty-five minutes. The last of the money goes on dinner, late, somewhere in Palermo, at an hour that will feel wrong for about two days and then stop feeling wrong at all.
1
Plaza de Mayo
Start where the city argues with itself. The Casa Rosada is at one end, the cathedral at the other, and there is a decent chance of a demonstration in between, which is not a reason to leave.
2
Café Tortoni
A hundred and sixty years old and genuinely worth the queue for one coffee. Bring cash. The gap between the official rate and the blue rate is the single biggest factor in what this trip costs you, and it is a cash gap.
3
Feria de San Telmo
Sundays, along Defensa, and it runs for about a kilometre. Weekdays the neighbourhood is quieter and better. Either way this is where the exchange rate stops being an abstraction and starts being lunch for three dollars.
4
Caminito, La Boca
Go in daylight, stay on the painted streets, and know that it is a tourist block rather than a neighbourhood tour. It is still worth an hour. Take the 29 bus down rather than a taxi.
5
Recoleta Cemetery
Day two, north, and free to walk. It is a city of mausoleums on a grid with street names, and it takes as long as you let it.
6
El Ateneo Grand Splendid
A 1919 theatre turned into a bookshop, boxes and all, five minutes from the cemetery. You can sit in the stalls and read without buying anything, and plenty of people spend an afternoon doing exactly that.
6 stops in Buenos Aires