The South American city that looks, and feels, like Paris
There’s more than a touch of France in the grand boulevards, ornate Haussmann-esque architecture and pavement cafes of this Argentine hub.
Melbourne has Melburnians. Liverpool has Liverpudlians. And Buenos Aires? It has Portenos. They are, quite literally, the people of the port, and this one word is the key that unlocks the identity of this entire city and its inhabitants.
As my Porteno philosopher-guide, Andres, explains on my recent visit: “We are not South Americans. We are Europeans. Argentina was once a rich country, and when it needed workers, like the US, it opened its doors to Europe.”
European workers arrived in their droves, the vast majority from Spain and Italy. Migration in the 19th and early 20th centuries was by sea, and the new arrivals settled initially in the port. La Boca may be known now mostly for its football team and as a popular tourist haunt by day, but it was also one of the city’s first waterside barrios, filled with multicoloured tenements painted with leftover marine paint to inject a little joie de vivre.
It is just as colourful today, awash with giant murals and tango dancers who strut their sultry stuff on the cobbled streets. What they lack in expertise the performers make up for in authenticity. La Boca was, after all, the birthplace of tango – though regarded by the Spanish colonial aristocracy as a sordid street dance for the likes of criminals and prostitutes.
Then, in the early 20th century, the tango arrived in Paris, and went down a storm. And if the tango was loved in Paris – the most stylish city on the world’s most stylish continent, one that Buenos Aires had been emulating for decades – then it had to be a good thing. The wealthy inhabitants of La Recoleta were as keen to hang on to their European roots as Andres and his fellow Portenos are today. They decided to embrace the tango as part of their unique cultural heritage.
You see the European influence everywhere: in the vast boulevards (“the widest in the world”); the Beaux-Arts architecture; the dozens of theatres; the pavement cafes set beneath the trees; the fine literary culture celebrated in the world’s most beautiful bookshop, Ateneo Grand Splendid, originally a theatre and still with all its gold leaf in place.
French and Italian architects were brought in to design the most distinguished buildings and there was a deliberately Haussmann-like plan to lay out the streets, squares and parks a la Parisienne. Francesco Tamburini was one such architect, responsible for the original design of the city’s opera house, the Teatro Colon (declared by Pavarotti the best in the world). Tamburini also designed part of the presidential palace or Casa Rosada (the Pink House, as opposed to the White House). In the film Evita, Madonna sang Don’t Cry for Me Argentina from its balcony.
Stroll through Buenos Aires’ classiest areas, Retiro and La Recoleta, and such is the extent of the Belle Epoque architecture you could almost forget which city you are in. One example of this is Recoleta’s Mansion (now part of the Four Seasons Hotel), with a history that could rival the Taj Mahal for romance. Commissioned as a wedding gift by Felix Alzaga Unzue for his bride Elena, such was its sophistication that it not only had an English architect, Robert Prentice, but all of its materials – marble, stone, wood, gilding – were imported from Europe, too.
It wasn’t only the living who resided in grandeur in La Recoleta. Just as much architectural care and Italian marble were lavished on the dead in the barrio’s extraordinary cemetery. Eva Peron’s mausoleum is a place of pilgrimage here, but it is the row upon row (across almost 6ha) of monuments laid out like city blocks that draw you through its neoclassical gates. Who knew there could be so many weeping angels?
The wealthy lived in European mansions in Recoleta, and were stylishly buried in its cemetery, but what about their holidays? For these, they retreated to summerhouses in the Tigre Delta, an area that derives its name from the jaguars – “tigers” – that inhabited it when the first Europeans arrived.
Despite being pretty familiar with the city, I have never been to the delta, partly because it doesn’t have roads. I am in need of a boat – luckily, my new friend Andres has one.
“People say it’s like Venice,” he tells me as we motor through, “but it’s not. It’s unique.” Indeed it is. There are wooden jetties and steps down to water that is the colour of milky coffee because of the sediment. There are islands and inlets, canals and gullies, and the gardens are regularly flooded when the wind blows from the wrong direction and the waters of the Parana River back up. Some people live here all year round, and there are boats for the general public, school children and supermarket shoppers – even a floating hospital. It is a unique community, as Andres says, and yet there is something oddly familiar about it.
It dawns on me as we pass the Argentine Rowing Club, a half-timbered mock-Tudor building. Willows dip their leaves in the water. Coots and ducks bob along the surface. I can hear the rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker. For a moment, I could be on the Thames in Surrey.
La Recoleta is, Andres informs me, old money. The new money is in Puerto Madero (“footballers” he says, with a barely detectable sniff). This is a barrio that lies on the waterfront adjacent to La Boca and had, until relatively recently, been a similar place of danger, derelict warehouses and neglected tenements. Over the past decade, however, this has been swept away and replaced by luxury hotels and apartments, shops and restaurants. It is all pretty impressive, with buildings designed by Norman Foster and Philippe Starck.
The road network has been redesigned with streets named after famous South American women (it’s not all about Evita here). There is a vast ecological waterside park and a magnificent pedestrian bridge, Punta de la Mujer (the Woman’s Bridge), designed to represent a couple dancing the tango. There are two museum ships, too, next to the bridge, commemorating the Argentine Navy.
At night, Puerto Madero is buzzing and the locals fill the outdoor tables that sprawl across the pavements by the park and next to the river. A shiny new barrio for Buenos Aires? It seems that perhaps the Portenos are making the port their own again, at last.
In the know
Four Seasons Hotel Buenos Aires has rooms from about $1300 a night.
ToursByLocals offers a seven-hour private tour called Discovering the Paris of South America with Andres for $US620 ($940) for up to four people.
Anna Selby was a guest of the Four Seasons Hotel Buenos Aires and ToursByLocals.
TELEGRAPH MEDIA GROUP
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