Chapter one · Five nights
Buenos Aires
A city that was built to look like Europe and then spent a century refusing to behave like it. Wide boulevards, wrought-iron balconies, a cemetery that is genuinely one of the great sights of the Americas — and dinner that starts at ten.
Casa Rosada, Plaza de Mayo · Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 3.0
The base
Why Palermo, and why it matters
Buenos Aires is enormous — three million people in the city proper, fifteen million in the metropolitan area — and where you sleep decides what the trip feels like.
Palermo Soho is the answer: low buildings, jacaranda-lined streets, cobblestones, and a density of restaurants, cafés, bookshops and design stores that means you can step out of the hotel with no plan and be perfectly fine. The neighbourhood was a working-class quarter that the city's designers and chefs took over about twenty years ago, and it has kept the scale of the former while acquiring the ambition of the latter.
Practically, it also means the free day works. You are not commuting in from somewhere dull to reach the interesting parts — you are already there.
Day two · 18 October
The northern half: Recoleta
A private half-day tour with an English-speaking guide, covering the grand, moneyed, French-influenced side of the city.
The cemetery
Recoleta Cemetery is not a sombre place; it is a city block of miniature marble buildings laid out along named streets, about 4,700 of them, in every architectural style the nineteenth century could produce — neoclassical, art nouveau, art deco, baroque, and several that defy category. Presidents, generals, Nobel laureates and one Eva Perón are inside.
It rewards a guide. Half the interest is in which family built what, when they lost their fortune, and which vault has been quietly abandoned.
And around it
The Recoleta district that surrounds the cemetery is Buenos Aires at its most Parisian — broad avenues, embassies, the Palais de Glace, the fine arts museum, and the enormous rubber tree in Plaza Francia that has needed structural props since the 1970s.
A short way south is El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a 1919 theatre converted into a bookshop with the boxes and the painted ceiling intact, and regularly named the most beautiful bookshop in the world.
Day three · 19 October
The southern half: San Telmo and La Boca
The second private half-day tour goes the other way — older, rougher, louder, and where the city actually started.
San Telmo
The oldest barrio in the city, and the one the wealthy abandoned during the 1871 yellow fever epidemic — which is precisely why its colonial houses survived. Cobbled streets, antique dealers, a covered market from 1897 still selling both vegetables and vinyl, and on Sundays a feria that takes over Calle Defensa for a full kilometre.
La Boca
Down at the old port on the Riachuelo, where Genoese dockworkers built their houses out of leftover ship plating and painted them with whatever marine paint was going spare. The result is Caminito: two blocks of saturated colour, tango dancers working the pavement for tips, and the Boca Juniors stadium rising above the rooftops.
That evening
Tango dinner and show, with private transfers there and back. The show is a shared one — you are in a room with other people, which is rather the point. Dinner is included.
Tango at the Sunderland Club, Villa Urquiza · Jorge Royan, CC BY-SA 3.0
Day four · 20 October
The day with nothing in it
No guide, no pickup, no schedule. This was a deliberate choice, and it is arguably the best day on the itinerary. A few things worth knowing:
Eat late
Lunch runs from 1pm. Dinner genuinely does not start until 9, and 10 is normal. Book anything popular in Palermo a few days ahead. A parrilla — the traditional grill — is the thing to do at least once.
Coffee and medialunas
The café culture here is serious and unhurried. Medialunas are the local croissant, smaller and sweeter, glazed with syrup. Nobody will rush you out of a table.
Walk the parks
The Bosques de Palermo are a twenty-minute walk from the hotel — rose garden, lakes, the Japanese garden, the planetarium. In late October the jacarandas are coming into purple bloom across the whole city.
Or go out of town
If the group would rather not stay put, the classic day trip is San Antonio de Areco — a gaucho town on the pampas about an hour and three-quarters away, with a working estancia, El Ombú, that does lunch and horses. It is not part of the booked programme, but it can be added.
Elsewhere in the city
Things that aren't on the schedule but are worth the detour
