Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires was founded not once but twice: Pedro de Mendoza established a settlement at the Río de la Plata's southern bank in 1535, only to see it abandoned after indigenous Querandí resistance. Juan de Garay refounded the city in 1580, and from that second beginning grew one of the New World's great metropolises. The city's name — "Fair Winds" — described the southerly breeze that helped Spanish galleons navigate the estuary. By the late 19th century, Argentina's beef and grain boom had transformed Buenos Aires into the wealthiest city in Latin America, and European immigrants — Italians, Spanish, Germans, Eastern European Jews — poured through its docks to build the neoclassical boulevards, ornate theatres, and café culture that still define the city's character.

Buenos Aires wears its European ambitions proudly. The Avenida de Mayo, stretching 1.3 kilometres from the presidential Casa Rosada to the Palacio del Congreso, was modelled directly on the Gran Vía in Madrid. The Teatro Colón, whose horseshoe-shaped auditorium opened in 1908, is consistently ranked among the world's five finest opera houses for its acoustics — mahogany panelling, velvet upholstery, and a ceiling fresco of clouds beneath which Enrico Caruso, Toscanini, and María Callas all performed. The cemetery of La Recoleta, where Eva Perón is buried in the Duarte family vault among generals and Nobel laureates, is as much architectural promenade as necropolis — its neoclassical mausoleums rising in a grid of marble avenues.

Buenos Aires is a city of obsessive carnivores, and its parrilla tradition — the wood-fire grill — produces beef of a quality that the rest of the world can only approximate. The asado is more than a meal: it is a social ritual governed by careful protocol, the parrillero orchestrating the slow cooking of tira de asado (short ribs), vacío (flank), and mollejas (sweetbreads) over embers of quebracho wood. San Telmo's weekend Feria de San Telmo fills the cobblestoned streets around the 1897 iron-and-glass Mercado de San Telmo with antique dealers, tango dancers, and empanada vendors. The neighbourhood's peñas — informal folk music venues — and milongas — tango dance halls — keep the city's musical traditions alive well past midnight.

The Tigre Delta, 30 kilometres north, offers a dreamlike landscape of Paraná river channels navigable only by motor launch, its shores dense with willows and weekend beach houses. The wine country of Mendoza — seven hours west by overnight bus or 90 minutes by air — produces the malbec that has placed Argentina at the forefront of the New World wine renaissance. Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay, a 50-minute hydrofoil crossing across the estuary, is a UNESCO-listed Portuguese colonial town of cobblestoned streets and pastel ruins whose peaceful scale makes the perfect counterpoint to Buenos Aires's urban intensity. Further south, El Chaltén and Los Glaciares National Park reveal Patagonia's raw grandeur.

Buenos Aires is South America's premier cruise hub, with AIDA, Atlas Ocean Voyages, Azamara, Carnival Cruise Line, Costa Cruises, Crystal Cruises, Cunard, Fred Olsen Cruise Lines, Hapag-Lloyd Cruises, Holland America Line, HX Expeditions, Lindblad Expeditions, MSC Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises, Ponant, Princess Cruises, Quark Expeditions, Regent Seven Seas Cruises, Saga Ocean Cruises, Scenic Ocean Cruises, Scenic River Cruises, Seabourn, Silversea, Tauck, and Viking all including the city on South American and Antarctic itineraries. Nearby excursion destinations include El Chaltén, Los Glaciares National Park, and Los Cardones National Park. The austral summer from November through March offers the most comfortable conditions for exploring both the city and the Patagonian south.