Buenos Aires: Aires and Graces by Brian Johnston
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A century ago Buenos Aires was the wealthiest city in the world, a place of fine boulevards, ornate architecture, dazzling theatres and snobbish gentlemen’s clubs. Residents absorbed European styles, laying out French parks and Spanish churches and working-class suburbs that could have been neighbourhoods in Rome. Since then the city has been in slow decline, recently beset by more economic woes. City residents knock around their palatial buildings like old people lost in a rambling family mansion, a little serious and melancholy but still determined to enjoy the good life while it lasts. And while their environment may look European their spirit is Latin: people giggle in parks, dine out on great shanks of beef, dance the tango far into the night, and follow the passions of soccer. Visit Buenos Aires and you’ll find a place of contradictions and curiosities, but you’ll never be bored.
One contradiction is certainly the city’s European flavour in a South American setting. Start exploring the city centre and you might well think you’re in Paris, Madrid or even Budapest. Women in high heels walk their pampered pooches along streets of palatial buildings adorned with statues and imposing domes, while white-haired gentlemen haunt grand old cafés from days gone by, sipping coffee under dusty chandeliers. The city’s main boulevard, Avenida 9 de Julio, is even said to be modelled on the Champs Elysées. The traffic is certainly just as ferocious; the avenues twenty lanes of hurtling cars form the world’s widest boulevard. Over it all soars the city’s symbol, an enormous Obelisk that’s a favoured gathering place for crowds celebrating soccer victories or holding political rallies.
When it comes to politics, Plaza de Mayo – the town’s original square, first laid out in 1580 – reveals much about Argentine history. The Cabildo or town hall is one of the few Spanish colonial buildings left in the city. Over in the cathedral you’ll find the tomb of the famous liberator General José de San Martín, who brought independence to Argentina, as well as Peru and Chile. But the square is dominated by the Presidential Palace, painted a gaudy salmon colour that gives rise to its nickname, the Pink House. From its balcony a succession of presidents – and most famously the wife of one, Eva Perón or Evita – have addressed the crowds. Outside, mothers whose children disappeared under the dark days of the dictatorship still stand vigil under the palm trees, while old men sit around the fountains smoking cigarillos and lamenting the sorry state of the economy.
Another important city square is Plaza General Lavalle, a delightful green space full of flowering jacaranda and magnolia trees. The Supreme Court dominates one side, and lawyers flit too and fro, while stall owners at the second-hand book market share their esoteric knowledge of Argentine law. Best of all, though, is the spectacular Teatro Colón, opened during Buenos Aires’ heyday in 1908. Every great name in opera and ballet – from Nijinsky to Caruso and Pavarotti – has performed here in the splendid five-tiered auditorium. Forget the show; it’s worth a visit even for the intermission, when you can wander through Greek columns and admire Italian frescoes and French stained glass. The theatre is a perfect symbol of Buenos Aires: flamboyant and decaying, a little melancholy, full of men in vicuña coats and society ladies in diamonds that might just, these days, be paste.
When the upper classes aren’t at the theatre they’re haunting the well-heeled suburbs of Belgrano, Recoleta and Retiro. Spend a few hours wandering around to admire the tree-lined boulevards, ambitious houses and shady parks of these wealthy neighbourhoods. Recoleta in particular has a French-flavoured elegance, and is full of fine restaurants, the boutiques of local and international fashion designers, and several excellent art museums. Strangely enough, the greatest attraction is the Cemetery of La Recoleta, established in 1822 and the resting place of the city’s most eminent citizens: prominent landowners, literary figures, dictators and presidents, independence heroes and of course Eva Perón, whose plain black granite family vault is permanently piled with flowers and messages. There are some six thousand other family tombs, some seventy of which have been declared national monuments. Every corner oozes bronze plaques, war memorials, quotations by Borges, and statues of saints and winged Victories. Cats prowl among the tombstones in astonishment, sunning themselves on marble inscriptions. Tombs vie to outdo each other in ostentation: pseudo-Greek temples, granite mausoleums, Art Deco masterpieces and fake Babylonian monstrosities hidden among the yew and cypress trees.
La Recoleta is undoubtedly one of the world’s great cemeteries, but if it’s more life you’re looking for then head to the neighbourhoods south of the city centre. Before moving northwards after an outbreak of yellow fever in the 1870s the elite lived here; later the area was taken over by the working classes. In San Telmo you can trace grand architecture in the tenement buildings, with their Spanish colonial windows and ornate Italian curlicues. These days San Telmo has undergone something of a renaissance. Artists and antique dealers have moved in, giving the neighbourhood a raffish bohemian energy. Come here at the weekend, when street performers swallow fire outside the church with its blue and white bell tower, and shows of avant-garde theatre and music are held at the Museum of Modern Art.
Best of all is the Plaza Dorrego, the heart of San Telmo, and incidentally the place where Argentina declared independence from Spain. On Sundays it hosts a busy antiques and handicrafts market where you can browse for silverware, leather good and curious, as well as eccentric memorabilia such as old ticket machines and kitchenware. Then sit at a café under the trees and watch locals play chess and cards. Later in the evening tango dancers emerge to strut their stuff across the cobblestones, accompanied by haunting music that drifts up with the cigarette smoke and conversations of the onlookers.
Ah, the tango! They say the dance reflects the soul of Argentina: melancholy, wistful, erotic. It originated in working-class neighbourhoods such as San Telmo itself, as a rough and ready musical style often accompanied by obscene lyrics. Later it was refined and embraced by all of Argentina. There are plenty of places in Buenos Aires where you can have dinner and see a tango show, but while technical dance displays are often dazzling, it’s the rough passion of street dancing in places like Plaza Dorrego that’s truly delightful. This is the best Buenos Aires experience of all, as dancers twirl and pout in the shadows of evening, accompanied by the haunting banoneon concertina and the raspy voices of elderly men.
Like jazz, tango was a heady music that originated from the brothels and bars of the working classes. La Boca lays claim to being the place where it all started: a harbourside neighbourhood once mostly populated by Italian immigrants and famous not only for tango but for soccer. Diego Maradona started his career with the Boca Juniors – the most popular team in Argentina, whose football stadium dominates the neighbourhood – and it won’t be long before you come across local kids kicking a ball around the street. Many of La Boca’s houses are painted in the team colours to which the owners own passionate allegiance. They add a dash of exotic colour to what was once a place of busy docks and warehouses, most of which now lie in decay, fronted by rusting ships abandoned on the brown waters of the River Plate.
Life has returned to one area of La Boca, the few streets centred on the Caminito, a pedestrian thoroughfare which functions as a cross between an outdoor museum and market. The odd-shaped houses with their corrugated iron roofs are painted in vivid, clashing colours, giving the impression of some cubist collection put together by a kindergarten class. Many are adorned with giant frescoes depicting nostalgic scene of the tango and immigrant life in the 1950s; it was in fact Genoese immigrants who brought with them the tradition of painting their houses with paint left over from their fishing boats. The atmosphere is still Italian, with many excellent pizzerias, and customers in bars arguing about soccer over the Chianti. But it’s artists who have colonised the streets, working at easels on pictures that often have political or social themes. One of the best-known artists is Guillermo Alio, a gentleman in his mid-fifties who has won international recognition for his art. He has performers dance the tango on huge canvasses laid out in the road, with the man’s feet dipped in black paint and the woman’s dipped in red, forming designs of abstract paint and passion. There’s nothing better than to linger on the street, talking to the artists and watching the tango dancers: Buenos Aires at its brilliant best.