8 ideal things to do in Buenos Aires

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked June 13, 2025

Recoleta Cemetery, before the tour groups
RecoletaFirst hour of the day
Four and a half thousand vaults on five and a half hectares, laid out in proper streets, marble angels leaning over you from both sides. Eva Perón's is the one everybody hunts for and it is a plain Duarte family tomb, which is the whole point — she is with her relatives, not on a plinth. Get deliberately lost, and look for the vaults with cracked glass and a visible coffin, because this city has never been sentimental about tidying up. Ninety minutes got me perhaps a third of it.
El Ateneo Grand Splendid
Avenida Santa Fe, Barrio NorteLate afternoon, when people are actually reading
A theatre from 1919 that showed Buenos Aires its first talkies, converted to a bookshop in 2000 with the boxes, the stage curtain and Nazareno Orlandi's ceiling frescoes left alone. You can sit in a former loge with a book you have not paid for and nobody comes to move you on. I read forty pages of a Spanish paperback I only half followed, in a red velvet box, at four in the afternoon, and understood something about a city that spends money on beauty it cannot really afford.
Teatro Colón guided tour
Cerrito and Tucumán, MicrocentroBook a slot; the English tours run less often than the Spanish
The tour takes you through the Golden Hall, the Gallery of Busts and out into the horseshoe auditorium, and the guide will talk about the acoustic at length and with justified pride. If a rehearsal is running you get thirty seconds of orchestra through a door and it ruins the rest of the tour in the best possible way. Split has an opera house as well. I have never once heard anybody in another country bring it up unprompted.
Feria de San Telmo along Defensa
Plaza Dorrego and Calle Defensa, San TelmoSundays only, and before eleven if you want the antiques
Running since 1970, close to three hundred stalls on Plaza Dorrego and spilling down Defensa, Humberto Primo and Pasaje Giuffra. The plaza itself is the antiques — soda siphons, brass scales, vinyl, the contents of houses belonging to families that used to have money. The surrounding streets are crafts and noise. Ten thousand people come through and it still works. I bought a 1940s siphon, carried it around Argentina for three weeks, and broke it in Mendoza.
A milonga at Salón Canning
Avenida Scalabrini Ortiz, PalermoStarts late; the hours worth staying for are after midnight
This is social dancing rather than a show: an old wooden floor, tables round the edge, and people in their sixties dancing better than anyone you will ever see on a stage. Parakultural is the long-running night here. Nobody will ask you to dance and nobody minds if you sit with a drink and watch the cabeceo, the eye-contact invitation thrown across the room, which takes twenty minutes to start noticing and then you cannot stop. La Viruta is two hundred metres away if you have committed.
MALBA and the Frida Kahlo
Figueroa Alcorta, PalermoWeekday mornings; the Kahlo draws a queue
Latin American twentieth-century art in a building that gets the light right, grown out of one collector's private holdings. The painting everyone comes for is Kahlo's 1942 Autorretrato con chango y loro, bought at auction in New York in 1995 for what was then a record. It is smaller than every reproduction has led you to expect. Everything always is. The Argentine and Uruguayan modernists in the rooms around it are the reason to stay past the photograph you came to take.
Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur
Behind Puerto Madero, on the Río de la PlataTuesday to Sunday; shut Mondays and shut when it rains
Three hundred and fifty hectares of reclaimed riverbank the city forgot to develop, so nature repossessed it: lagoons, coypu, and something like three hundred and forty recorded bird species, ten minutes' walk from the most expensive real estate in Argentina. Flat, wide, and almost no shade, so carry water because the porteño summer does not negotiate. Both times I have walked it I have ended up staring at a bird I could not name, which is not a hobby I have ever claimed.
La Bombonera and Caminito
La BocaNon-matchday for the tour; matchday only through a proper agency
Stadium tours run through the Museo de la Pasión Boquense, the players' tunnel and out to the edge of a pitch wedged into a city block so tightly that one stand had to be built almost vertical. Caminito, the painted alley outside, is a stage set with dancers charging for photographs, and I say that fondly, because La Boca was a poor immigrant port district that painted its houses with whatever ship paint was left over. Stay on the tourist streets after dark, or do not stay.

The long version

Buenos Aires: the European city at the bottom of the Americas

Buenos Aires runs on a particular timetable: lunch at two, drinks at nine, dinner at eleven, the milonga at one in the morning, breakfast back at the apartment as the sun comes up over the Río de la Plata. Adjust your sleep schedule before you arrive.

Read the full essay →