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In Recoleta they often die as they have lived — beyond their means. Buenos Aires' most prestigious suburb, Recoleta, has its own exclusive necropolis where row upon row of marble vaults accommodate the dusty repose of the city's once-gilded elite.

Imagine a cemetery populated exclusively by pedigree surnames, and right in the middle, lowering the tone, rests a scrap metal dealer or Lotto winner. That's Recoleta Cemetery. In this case, the post-mortem gatecrasher is Eva ("Evita") Peron. Loved in life by the poor, she is surrounded in death by the rich who despised her then and still do.

Eva Duarte Peron (the second wife of Argentinian President General Juan Peron) died of cancer at age 33 in 1952. She divides Argentineans in death as she did in life: some think of the ex-actress as an almost saintly friend to the poor, while others consider her little more than a social climbing tart.
Buenos Aires is a bright city of melancholia set to a dance-step. A tango town of once-fabulous wealth and now of nostalgic mansions gone to delicious decrepitude. City of jackbooted generals and the Mothers of the Disappeared, of Maradona and even, briefly, of Madonna.

There's more to "BA" than memories of tarts, tango and generalissimos. This city of Belle Époque elegance and endlessly wide avenues is like no other Latin American capital. From the red, pink and blue houses of Caminita to the centre's grandiose edifices, BA is a city of fascinations. The coffee's great, as are the coffee shops, like the famous Cafe Tortoni, founded 1858 and once patronised by writers such as Lorca and Pirandello; and Argentinean steaks are as large as your place mat. The wealth, mostly generated by the export of pampas beef, mutton and wheat, that once created this New World melding of Paris, Rome and New York must have been astounding.

The taxis are metered. The public buses are good. But the walking is even better. And this is what I did, letting the city's vast, flat blocks crowd me with their impressions. A sunlit city with the grumps, I thought at first. (In fact, Porteños, the inhabitants of Buenos Aires, are famously unhappy and are said to have two addictions, coffee and psychoanalysis.) BA's endowment of riches may have been squandered by generals and later choked off by changes in world commodity prices, often leaving the city's sumptuous old buildings in need of renovation, but, walking its streets, the patina of history rubs off on one's elbows, almost literally.

The first Spanish settlement here, on the banks of the Rio de La Plata, was founded in 1536. Much later, in 1807, the British invaded and were booted straight back out. The Spanish colonial masters received their own marching orders just a few years later. By the turn of the century, Buenos Aires was the largest city in Latin America, with a population of over one million. Massive immigration added German, Welsh, Basque, Irish, Italian and English blood to that of the earlier Spaniards and Amerindians.

In the harbour suburb of Boca (where Diego Maradona started his soccer career at Boca Juniors club), one old street has been reborn as a walk-through art galley. Closer to an alley than an avenue, Caminita is more notable for its buildings — multi-storeyed structures made entirely of corrugated iron and painted like grand, primary-coloured cubes — than for its art, which is mostly nostalgic images of zoot-suited blokes with Brylcreem hair and bedroom eyes, tango dancing with slinky dames.

Nearby in San Telmo district, the plazas, cobbled streets and outdoor cafes seem so European that this could be Italy in the 1950s, or even General Franco's Spain. (One guide book notes that, "BA doesn't look like Europe, it looks like a postcard of Europe.") Yet this is always Argentina — with tango tunes trotting in the background, handsome Creole people, and the walls splashed with today's version of "Yankee Go Home": "Viva Evita! Fuera Madonna!" — "Long live Evita! Get out Madonna!". (Madonna stayed only long enough, in early 1997, to portray Evita in the musical film of the same name.) However, the prices are almost North American. In a "dollarized" economy — the US greenback and the Argentine peso have parity and are interchangeable — many of the city prices are surprisingly high.

Theatre Colon, the grand 1908 opera house, seems like it just drifted down a canal from Venice. There's no such whimsy attached to the imposing La Casa Rosada, the President's Palace, from whose balcony Juan and Eva Peron stirred the crowds with jingoism — as later did President Leopoldo Galtieri when, in 1982, he quixotically led Argentina to war against England over the Falkland Islands. There's Avenue Ninth of July, at 16 lanes across, the world's widest city street. And, of course, the Porteños .

Almost 40 percent of Argentina's 34 million people live in greater Buenos Aires. Beyond the elegant architecture and touristic tango clubs, it is the Porteños who make the place. In BA, "personality" still means the triumph of substance over style. Everywhere, you see people with a resilient
individualism still intact, a touch of their own class, a slightly fierce glint in the eye. People who are more than just the sum of their clothes. It's the spirit that regained Argentineans a civilian democracy in 1983 after too many generations of Generals.

At a fashionable outdoor cafe in Recoleta (BA's equivalent of Toorak) on a crowded, sunny Sunday afternoon I saw a display of "who-gives-a-hoot" pleasure — at once, both intensely private and public — that one might wait a month of Sundays to still not see in other, more self-conscious cities.
A well-heeled woman of about sixty sat at a table with her bicycle parked beside her. A bottle of mineral water and a coffee waited half-consumed on the table; her tanned, smooth midriff was bare, her sneakered feet were propped on a chair. She leaned back with eyes closed in bliss as the Buenos Aires summer sun poured down like benediction.

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