Buenos Aires [1 ed.] 9781780233062, 9781780232669

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cityscopes

BUENOS AIRES

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Jason Wilson Buenos Aires, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Buenos Aires, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

BUENOS AIRES

Buenos Aires, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Cityscopes are concise, illustrated guides that provide an overview of a city’s past as well as a focused eye on its present. Written by authors with unique and intimate knowledge of the cities, each book features a chronological history to the present day. Also including a section of essays on key places or aspects of the city today – from museums to music, public transport to parks, food to fashion – the books offer fascinating vignettes on the quintessential and the quirky, as well as listings of key sites and venues with the authors’ own commentaries. Illustrated throughout with contemporary photos and compelling historical images, Cityscopes are essential companions to cities worldwide.   Titles in the series: Beijing Linda Jaivin

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Buenos Aires Jason Wilson

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cityscopes

BUENOS AIRES

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Jason Wilson

reaktion bo o k s

Buenos Aires, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

For Andrea

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London EC1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2014 Copyright © Jason Wilson 2014 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Hong kong

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 78023 266 9

OPENING IMAGES: pp. 6–7: Caminito, La Boca; pp. 8–9: Paseo del Filete, Abasto; pp. 10–11: tango dancers; p. 12: Rodin’s Thinker sculpture and the Palacio del Congreso; p. 13: La Recoleta cemetery; pp. 14–15: La Boca; p. 16: Patio de las Palmeras, Casa Rosada; p. 17 top: the Obelisk, avenues 9 de Julio and Corrientes; p. 17 bottom: card players in the plaza; pp. 18–19: daybreak at Puerto Madero.

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CONTENTS

Prologue 20 HISTORY 1 The Two Foundations of Buenos Aires, 1536 and 1580 27 2 The Colonial City and the English Invasions, 1806 and 1807 34 3 Independence City, 1810 and Repercussions 51 4 The Civil War City and Rosas, 1829–80 65 5 Buenos Aires as the Capital, 1880–1930 90 6 The Infamous decade, 1930–43 118 7 Perón, Evita, Peronism and Anti-Peronism, 1943–89 125 8 Into the Twenty-first-century City 144

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THE CITY TODAY Gardel’s Smoking Statue 157 La Bombonera, Boca Juniors and Football 164 On the Trail of Jorge Luis Borges 173 The Greening City 177 The Labyrinth of the Recoleta Cemetery 183 The Fin de Siècle City: From Plaza de Mayo to Congreso 188 Gallery City 195 Bookworm Paradise 201 The Museo Larreta and Walled Garden 206 LISTINGS 211 Chronology 225 Suggested Reading and viewing 228 Acknowledgements 234 Photo Acknowledgements 235 Index 236

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BUENOS AIRES

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TITLE

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TITLE

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Prologue

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A

s you fly low over Buenos Aires, you are struck by its urban spread along the vast, muddy river and then by downtown skyscrapers along the shore, by domes and steeples, by the grid patterns of one-way streets, its 140-m-wide Avenida 9 de Julio with metrobus lanes running down the middle, its overhead motorways, its football stadiums and expanding suburbs. It is an eclectic city, addicted to knocking down the past, but, in architect José María Peña’s words, the ‘incongruous mix’ gives Buenos Aires its character. ough still a port (its inhabitants are called porteños, ‘people of the port’, while those living outside the city limits in Buenos Aires province are bonaerenses), travellers arrive in one of the two airports (Ministro Pistarini, known as Ezeiza, and Jorge Newbery, the inner-city airport), rather than by sea as was the case with its millions of immigrants. On its own, in the southern hemisphere, this megacity has nearly 13 million inhabitants – it has been called Goliath’s Head as it contains one-third of the country’s population. e autonomous city, or Ciudad Autónoma, is bounded by the canalized river Riachuelo, the River Plate and the ring road Avenida General Paz. Its latest census, announced the day

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P r o lo g u e

ex-president Néstor Kirchner died unexpectedly, 27 October 2010, provisionally found 2,892,082 within the city limits. But whether limited to the Ciudad Autónoma or seen as sprawl, it is densely urban, anarchic and buzzing with life. It’s an anomaly in South America, being peopled mainly by European immigrants from its origin and flourishing from the end of the nineteenth century as the ‘Paris of the southern hemisphere’ – Argentina became wealthy through agricultural exports, European immigrants and being a nineteenth-century city. e city is chaotic and lively, dangerous and cosmopolitan, its people quick, creative and improvising; porteños are historically loathed by the provinces for their alleged arrogance. e locals are talkative and the culture oral. It has turned its back on the pampas and sought its own identity as an island-city, though it remains flat, without hills. e city makes up for its lack of a long, historical past with an intense urban bustle. e historian José C. Moya called Buenos Aires an example of ‘ethnic pluralism and conviviality’. One of the ten noisiest cities in the world, it has street corners where traffic din endangers the ears, like Corrientes and 9 de Julio, measured as 91 decibels. Already in 1914 W. H. Koebel (1872–1923), long-term resident, recorded traffic ‘roaring incessantly’. e Argentine diplomat and memorialist Vicente Quesada (1830–1913) recalled finding the din of cartwheels on cobbles deafening as a small boy in the 1830s. Street vendors (manteros) or the ghost-like cartoneros (illegal rubbish collectors) at dusk; the slow-strolling crowds, the dog walkers, Panoramic view of the city.

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Buenos aires

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The number 0 colectivo, which runs between Barracas

the porteros (apartment block porters) sweeping or gossiping outside the blocks of flats; the jerky, dirty colectivos (buses), the demonstrations with piqueteros (street activists) banging bombos (huge drums; ten years ago it could have been cacerolazos, ‘casseroles’), protest groups clashing pots and pans; hooting cars with flags and packed with football fans (hinchas) after a Superclásico between Boca and River teams; the reeking flower stands on so many street corners, the densely stacked newspaper kioscos that close up like clams; the packs of black-and-yellow taxis cruising the streets (until it rains); bars, confiterías (cafés selling pastries), ice-cream parlours and cafés spilling on to the narrow, bumpy pavements . . . all make street life noisily human. Over time Buenos Aires is not only spreading, but also rising. As a colonial city it was one-floored, with many quintas (gardens). Scottish traveller William MacCann in 1848 noted the

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P r o lo g u e

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‘filthy and dilapidated look of the houses, which are only a single storey high’. rough the nineteenth century it remained lowrise, apart from churches: Jorge Luis Borges’s horizontal city. But in 1848 the first three-floor building appeared; by 1869 there were 183. Elevators then transformed houses and offices, and by 1915 the first skyscraper, with fourteen floors, was built. By the 1950s the Italianate houses with high ceilings and doors had given way to interchangeable blocks of flats that make the narrow streets seem like canyons. Views were blocked and the wide bowl of sky unique to the pampas was lost. Modernistic skyscrapers now crowd the skyline of Puerto Madero, the newly transformed dock area. Certainly as you move away from the centre, buildings get lower, more like Argentina’s provincial towns. City dwellers reflect the weather. e southern hemisphere seasons condition both education dates and holidays –

a typical kiosco selling magazines and newspapers on Plaza italia.

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el obelisco, designed by architect alberto Prebisch, on av. 9 de Julio.

sweltering summers begin in December and end in March. A short winter runs from June to August; it has snowed three times on the city, but never settled. Hail is more common – huge ice stones have shattered cars and buildings. Dramatic storms follow heatwaves. It can rain torrentially (March is the rainiest month) and flood (the worst in January 1985). Trees bend double in the gales. Two winds have names: the Pampero, a cold wind off the pampas, and the Sudestada, off the river. ere are long periods of blue sky. Smog cloaks the city and smoke from burning fields has closed airports, as has Andean volcanic ash. Summer heat can be very humid, given the close, vast river. Air conditioners protrude from buildings and drip water on to pavements. ere have been mosquito invasions as the climate is subtropical, even if porteños moan of chilly winters. e city is becoming more tropical, as the globe heats up. An island effect of heat increases rainfall and weather extremes can be read back into porteño behaviour.

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View of the Plaza del Congreso and the Palacio del Congreso.

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1 The Two Foundations of Buenos Aires, 1536 and 1580

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I

n 1516 Europeans glimpsed the shore where the future Buenos Aires would be built on a freshwater sea called mar dulce. Juan Díaz de Solís, chief pilot of the Spanish navy, sailed along the northern coast of the River Plate; during the expedition his navigator, Martín García, died and was buried on an island, which was named after him. Solís himself, with some of his crew, was later killed by Charrúa people and a witness saw them being eaten. en in early 1520, Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand Magellan), earth’s first circumnavigator, seeking the Strait into the Pacific, sent a boat up what he named El Río de Solís (‘Solis’s River’), but discovered it was the River Plate estuary and sailed on south. e Venetian Sebastian Cabot spent five months reconnoitring the River Plate, sailed up the Paraná River and founded Argentina’s first settlement, Espíritu Santo, but it was burned down in 1529, after which Cabot returned to Spain. e first actual landing on what would become Buenos Aires was on 2 February 1536 (the day of the Virgin of La Candelaria, an icon of whom resides in a shrine in Cagliari, Sardinia, whose patroness saint gave the city its name: Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre). e Bavarian mercenary and conquistador Ulrich Schmidl sailed there with the noble adelantado Pedro de Mendoza’s fourteen ships and 1,700 men (including Santa Teresa of Avila’s brother Rodrigo de Cepeda), a number of women, and 72 horses from Cádiz. An adelantado was equivalent to a governor. Mendoza paid for the whole expedition himself. He acquired his wealth sacking Rome and died at sea, syphilitic, in 1537. e Spaniards stepped ashore on the barranca (riverbank) where today’s streets Humberto i and

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The imAginAry FoundATion oF Buenos Aires

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That the exact place where Mendoza landed hasn’t been discovered is at the core of the opening poem of Jorge Luis Borges’s collection Cuaderno San Martín (1929). Despite the statue of Pedro de Mendoza in Parque Lezama, the only witness was Ulrich Schmidl, who wrote what he remembered years later in German. Mendoza himself had brutally killed a soldier in Río and suffered syphilitic psychotic episodes. Of the thousands who arrived with him, many were foreigners like Schmidl. No documents exist concerning the founding of Buenos Aires and Borges titled his mocking poem ‘Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires’, slightly changing its 1929 title. Why ‘mythical’? Well, was it more than a collection of rancho shacks and a mud fort, as depicted in this painting? To start with the colonists shared food with the Querandí people. When Mendoza’s brother and six noblemen were killed, war was declared and the colony shrank to 500, suffering extreme hunger and even eating leather. Mendoza finally torched the place, abandoning five mares and seven horses. Borges doesn’t mention this famine, but jokes about the first arrivals in their mud huts by the Riachuelo. However, Borges’s arrivals landed in Palermo, the barrio of his childhood. They included a compadre (local thug), a barrel organ, a gringo and supporters of yRiGOyeN, playing tango. The past is an illusion and Borges’s foundation is as real as Mendoza’s and as illusory. There is no beginning. Buenos Aires is as old as water and air.

léonie Matthis, Santa María del Buen Ayre Attacked by the Querandí in 1536, 96.

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T h e T w o f o u n d aT i o n s o f B u e n o s a i r e s , 56 a n d 58 0

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ulrich schmidl’s map of Buenos aires, 599.

Defensa cross in San Telmo, although historians have also suggested the left bank of the sluggish, muddy Riachuelo (known as Dock Sud) or near the Vuelta de Rocha in La Boca, a low-lying dock slum on today’s aptly named Avenida Don Pedro de Mendoza. It was officially decided in 1936 that Mendoza had landed in Parque Lezama, a high-point of the bank, once lapped by the river. e city erected its bronze monument to Pedro de Mendoza, designed by Fernando Catalano and Carlos Oliva Navarro, in 1937. Mendoza baptized the settlement Puerto Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre, abbreviated to Buenos Aires. He took it from the shrine in Cagliari, which he had visited, and the name stuck; it means ‘Port of Our Lady Holy Mary of the Fair Winds’. e Spaniards set up their outpost as a fort, with straw-roofed mud shacks minus foundations and surrounded by mud ramparts. At first the indigenous peoples supplied fish and venison, but they soon turned hostile. We learn from Schmidl’s famous chronicle of his expeditions about the locals’ ‘camels’ (in reality, llamas), maize, sweet potatoes and bolas (round stones attached to leather thongs, thrown to tangle ostrich legs, allowing them

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Monument to Pedro de Mendoza by fernando Catalano and Carlos oliva navarro, 97, in Parque lezama.

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T h e T w o f o u n d aT i o n s o f B u e n o s a i r e s , 56 a n d 58 0

to be killed for food and feathers. Bolas would become part of the gaucho or cowboy mythology). With the supply of food from locals cut off and unable to plant crops due to indigenous hostility, famine struck and not even ‘mice, rats, snakes, shoes or leather’ could be found to eat. ree Spaniards were hanged after slaughtering and eating a horse and Schmidl reports cannibalism among the Spaniards. Another witness, Isabel de Guevara, claimed in a letter that over 1,000 died of hunger. The survivors lasted three years, then burned the outpost down and sailed up the Paraná. Mendoza’s gift, however, was the novelty of horses, which multiplied freely in the pampas and were soon adopted by the indigenous nomadic populatiom who ate horse flesh. Later, escaped cattle would also multiply to become Argentina’s staple diet, bifes, from the English ‘beef ’. The city was founded again on 29 May 1580 by the Basque Juan de Garay (1528–1583) when he landed at Barracas, a southern district of the city, on Trinity Sunday. Today there’s an avenue named after him, as well as a statue on the corner of Avenida Leandro Alem and Avenida Rivadavia, though nobody knows what he actually looked like. He had sailed down the great Paraná River from Asunción in Paraguay with 66 men and one woman, Ana Díaz, who later opened a pulpería (a bar and store) in the plot allocated to her by Garay. is journey down from the silver-rich centres of Potosí and Lima, in present-day Bolivia and Peru respectively (Lima was then viceregal capital of New Castile), illustrates the way Spain controlled its trade monopoly until 1776. All trade from Buenos Aires was by mule train to and fro over the Andes to Callao, Lima’s harbour. ese trade journeys over the Andes explain also why provincial Argentine cities like Córdoba and Santa Fe are older than Buenos Aires, because the conquering Spaniards came down the rivers from Peru. Inevitably, over the early colonial years, settlers in distant Buenos Aires would become wealthy through contraband, the obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey but do not comply) response to authority that thrived with the corruption of a far-flung empire. At first cuero (leather) was traded;

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View of Buenos aires harbour and town, c. 68, from the Atlas of Johannes Vingboons (665).

the rest of the animal was mainly left to rot, apart from for tallow for candles. Garay officially established this new city, La Trinidad, on 11 June 1580. He planned the grid city from scratch, based on colonial principles and Charles v’s leyes de Indias (instructions to build similar grid cities in the colonies), much as it stands today – away from the Riachuelo and its port Buenos Aires (and so safer from pirate attacks) and with a central plaza, cathedral, cabildo (town hall with elected members and prison) and fort. Garay called it Trinidad because he had landed on Trinity Sunday, but it was the port’s name, Buenos Ayres, that stuck. He divided the city into blocks (manzanas) and each block into four plots. It’s not completely geometrical as it follows the bending river on the east. He chose for its patron saint San Martín de Tours, a French bishop who had died in 397 ce, notorious for destroying pagan relics and whose own shrine was a famous stopover on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. A small plaza is named after him in Recoleta, a central district of the city, with huge gomero or rubber trees. Garay’s plan split the city into two: Catedral al Norte and Catedral al Sur (where the well-off would at first live, the

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cathedral forming the dividing line between North and South) – echoed today in the common but vague terms ‘Barrio Norte’ and ‘Barrio Sur’. But Buenos Aires, or La Trinidad as it should strictly be called, would remain a sleepy colonial backwater until Spain reneged on its monopoly ports, the nearest of which was over the Andes at Callao, Peru. e Crown allowed Buenos Aires to trade directly from 1776 by creating the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, which included today’s Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. e first virrey (viceroy, deputy to the rey, or king), Pedro de Cevallos, arrived that year, 1776, with 116 vessels and some 10,000 men. The second viceroy, Juan José de Vértiz (who succeeded in 1778; a street is named after him), began to modernize the city by paving some streets and erecting candle lamps – decisions that lasted into the middle of the nineteenth century. But Garay’s geometric city, engraved on to a leather map, was transformed from a virtual town into a colonial city, but kept its initial plots.

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2 The Colonial City and the english invasions, 1806 and 1807

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hat Garay created in his day was less a city and more of a basic village. Not much of this village – evoked nostalgically by the title of Lucio López’s serialized novel La gran aldea (‘e Great Village’), a nickname for Buenos Aires before immigration changed it – still stands, apart from his chessboard tracing and sites like the main plaza, or the constantly rebuilt cathedral and cabildo. Robert Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936), a Scottish writer, politician and adventurer who spent years in Argentina, remembered Garay’s actual house off the main plaza (now a plaque in today’s Banco de la Nación), made of adobe bricks. However, the past has played a scant symbolic role. From when Garay paced out the unbuilt urban blocks, this has always been a city facing the future. e early years produced a village of mud huts (ranchos), with a halfcompleted fort. In 1691 the Jesuit Antonio Sepp (the Jesuit order arrived in 1608) dismissed it as a little village with two roads in the shape of a cross. ere were no quarries nearby, little timber apart from the local thorny talas and hollow ombúes and no glass. Leather was used for everything from roofs to binding beams, buckets, windows, doors and, stretched tight, military beds called catre. e contraband trade in hides and tallow would in time enrich these early pioneers, though killing cattle for hides and leaving the flesh to rot, much to the delight of wild dogs and rats, was wasteful slaughter. It took news ages to reach this outpost (some 105 days in 1657 by sail) and there was no gold. Until the Franciscans arrived in 1582 there was still only one mud-floored rancho church. Slowly over the seventeenth century, the public buildings planned on Garay’s leather map were built, beginning with the

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churches and convents. A map of 1713 shows the large fort, which was the governor’s palace (and later the viceroy’s quarters) and barracks, with dry moat and drawbridge, the newly constructed cabildo and a few parish churches. I will outline some churches, attached to monasteries, because they tend to be time capsules from the past. It is essential to bear in mind the lack of stone and the soft alluvial ground, because most churches have collapsed and been rebuilt several times. e cathedral, on Garay’s main plaza, began as the Iglesia Mayor in 1603; it fell down and was rebuilt in 1618. e city’s first bishop arrived in 1621 and it became the cathedral; it was twice rebuilt and collapsed again in 1752. e current cathedral began to be constructed on the same site between 1821 and 1827 by Prosper Catelin (1764–1842) and Pierre Benoit (1794– 1852), but now with a neoclassical-style twelvecolumned front (the twelve columns suggest the twelve Apostles) that deliberately effaced any Spanish look. e Santo Domingo church was first built in 1600, then moved in 1608 to the site where it stands today in the block bounded by the streets Defensa, Belgrano, Venezuela and Balcarce. It fell down in 1677 but was rebuilt and replaced by the current one

drawing of the city of Buenos aires, c. 70.

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Buenos aires

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Charles henri Pellegrini, Santo Domingo Church and a procession of our lady of the rosary, 8.

in 1751, designed by Antonio Masello. It will figure in the English invasions and is where Spanish-born Manuel Belgrano, inventor of the blue-and-white Argentine flag, is buried in a tomb designed by Héctor Ximenes in 1903, hence Avenida Belgrano (and the village Belgrano, later absorbed into the city). Further churches: San Francisco, the city’s first ‘proper’ church (1582), with its convent known as the One ousand Virgins, was rebuilt a third time in 1754 on Defensa and Alsina. San Telmo was designed by Andrés Blanqui (1675–1740) in 1736 (though its facade was redesigned in 1931); San Nicolás de Bari dates from 1721 (but was demolished in 1931 to construct the Obelisco); and the small, beautiful church and earliest convent, Santa Catalina de Siena, also by Blanqui, from 1745 (the English raised their flag here in 1807; when they burst in all the nuns were kneeling and subsequently kept silent for two days). When lit up inside, Santa Catalina de

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Siena’s gilded altar by Isidro Lorea dazzles. Outside it has the tallest palm tree in Buenos Aires and the cloisters are now a restaurant. During the long colonial period, religious rituals ruled the day with the loud tolling of church bells to remind porteños of their duties. It’s hard to hear bells today over the city noise, but in those days churches were the tallest buildings. Being a port, there was a customs house (aduana) from 1583, but it changed site constantly. Taxation would make Buenos Aires wealthy. In 1658 Azcarate du Biscay, a Basque traveller, counted twenty ships in the bay, each one carrying 14,000 hides. He noted that porteños ‘have no great stomach for fighting, love their ease and pleasure and are entirely devoted to Venus’, so that the Hospital or poor house was empty as

santa Catalina church, entrance on san Martín.

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el Pilar today.

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PiLAr ChurCh My favourite church, which originally stood outside the city, is the barely altered, bright-white Nuestra Señora del Pilar and convent, begun in 1716 and completed by the Jesuit architect Andrés Blanqui in 1732 for the order of monjes recoletos (retiring monks). it vies with the Jesuit church San ignacio to be the oldest existing church in Buenos Aires. Known as ‘el Pilar’ – celebrating Our Lady of the Pillar, the miraculous Virgin Mary who appeared in Zaragoza, Spain – it stands on Junín 1904. it was, when first built, the tallest building in the city. The vestibule still has alabaster windows and French mosaic tiles were added to the dome in the nineteenth century. Bernardino Rivadavia, while still a minister, expelled the monks in 1822, though they gave their name recoletos to a cemetery, La Recoleta and Buenos Aires’s most fashionable area, so that the term ‘La Recoleta’ stands for all three. Next to the church is the Centro Cultural Recoleta, on Junín 1930. First a convent, from 1822 it was an asylum for beggars, but as the city encroached it became, in 1944, an old people’s home housed in the collapsing buildings designed by architect Juan Buschiazzo between 1880 and 1885. in 1978 architects Jacques Bedel, Clorindo Testa and Luis Benedit (all successful painters) turned this ex-convent, now ensconced in the city, into a cultural centre. The Centro Cultural Recoleta shows contemporary Argentine art on the cheap. But it is the whole complex of buildings, including smart shops, restaurants and the open feria (fair) that matters. The old chapel, designed by Buschiazzo, was renamed el Aleph, after Borges’s story, though he located el Aleph, through which you could see everything, on Garay street in San Telmo. And it is a time capsule, with the cemetery La Recoleta attached.

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View of Buenos aires harbour, 8.

there were so few poor. Juan de Garay, the second founder, designed the city’s coat of arms (escudo) with a crowned black eagle, with four eagles below, holding a red cross dripping blood. However, in 1649 a later governor forgot this and designed a better – and what became the lasting – version, with two sailing ships (carabelas), a dove on a river and a piece of an anchor (obviously – it’s a port). To muddle matters, the official flag for Buenos Aires has Garay’s earlier coat of arms instead of the later one. Despite the two coats of arms for this port, it remained at the edge of empire, without silver or gold resources, with little to attract Spanish nobility and hence little interest in maintaining social orders. at everybody felt equal to everybody else in the port became a strand of porteño historical psychology. e Spaniards were divided into criollos (creoles) if born in the colonies and peninsulares if born in Spain, and there was animosity between them. e Europeans in general were gente decente (decent people). ey lived near Garay’s main square, today’s Plaza de Mayo, and by the eighteenth century in low, whitewashed buildings made of sun-dried adobe bricks, with

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flat roofs called azoteas to collect rain and also to sit on during hot nights in this humid subtropical location. e shape of the better homes was Roman/Moorish, with a high facade, windows with large grilles called rejas and a zaguán (high hallway) that led into the first of three patios with rooms along the sides, like houses in Andalucía. Doors were tall enough for a rider on horseback to pass through. Most also had underground aljibes (collection tanks) for water, with turtles feeding on the mosquito larvae. In the 1850s the Argentina-born naturalist W. H. Hudson (1841–1922) drank this water with its wriggling mosquito larvae. Some wells gave brackish water, so water was also brought in barrels on carts by people called aguateros. e patios held the well and some fruit trees and in the third one lodged servants, black slaves, the animals and the toilets. e city streets were of mud that was either irritating dust in the dry seasons or deep sludge churned by high-wheeled carts and hooves. e streets also stank. e few pavements were high, awkward and signalled by wooden posts. From its original population of around 7,500 in 1580, the city reached, in the census of 1778, 24,205 inhabitants, of whom 15,719 or 65 per cent were white, 30 per cent were black or mestizo and only 5 per cent were local indigenous peoples. Already these racial proportions, increasing with European immigration in the nineteenth century, made Buenos Aires different to Lima or Mexico City, which were essentially indigenous cities, with mixed races and small, white elites. e city’s population grew slowly to the 42,000 it held on 10 May 1810, the liberation from Spain, the madre patria (mother country). In 1770, the writings of ‘Concolorcorvo’ (meaning ‘with crow colour’ and the pen name of the Indian Calixto Bustamente Carlos, though this is questioned) evoked a colonial village of low houses, quintas with peach trees for firewood and an excess of meat: they still slaughtered more than they ate. Even the dogs were too fat to run. According to Concolorcorvo, the citizens dressed smartly in European style, with the women being the most ‘polished’ in the Americas, but there were no schools there (the nearest being in Córdoba). He printed a

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census of the city for 1770 with 21,065 inhabitants in five parishes, criollos outnumbering Spaniards, 4,163 slaves, and 68 people languishing in the cabildo jail. He noted that the streets turned so muddy with rain and floods that nobody could cross them and so people ‘go without mass’. Stating that the fort had a deep moat and a drawbridge, he explained that the guardia (the guard) and cajas reales (crown money) were kept there. Concolorcorvo observed that the cathedral was just a ‘narrow chapel’ and complained that the Pampero wind was so violent that it shook carts. The overall urban monotony was striking and everything happened behind closed doors. Nothing much disturbed the peace of everyday life in this colonial city, with its churches, bullring and market on the main plaza, except that in 1776 it was renamed as a Viceroyalty, with a virrey sent out to rule. Being allowed to trade directly by sea with Spain heralded an economic boom from 1780 to 1800, attracting merchants from Spain to exploit the new freedom to trade, rather than sending all goods over the Andes to Callao. In 1806, Buenos Aires had become, in historian John W. White’s estimation, the busiest port in the Spanish colonial empire. At the close of the eighteenth century,

rudolf Carlsen, View of the North Shore, 85.

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The Fort by Charles henri Pellegrini, 89.

the city began to thrive, with a theatre, a printing press, the promenade called the Paseo de la Alameda lined with ombú trees and benches to allow ‘court life’ to happen in fresh air, out of doors. What put the city on the map became known as the English Invasions, a colonial adventure that failed disastrously. e outline of the two English invasions is well established. General William Carr Beresford, second in command under Admiral Sir Home Popham, landed at Quilmes, to the south of Buenos Aires and now a suburb, on 26 June 1806, with 1,650 soldiers. ey had recently freed the Cape in South Africa from the Dutch but had proceeded to sack Buenos Aires without government permission. In London, Admiral Popham had been persuaded by his friend, the colourful Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda (1750–1812), that the Spanish colonies were ripe for independence. e city surrendered immediately and Beresford became its governor. Only one English soldier died, while the virrey, the Marquis Rafael de Sobremonte, fled with the coffers. e English chased him and at Luján grabbed back the booty of 1 million silver dollars, but he escaped. Beresford immediately granted the

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Charles henri Pellegrini, The Cathedral (and the Pirámide), c. 80.

city free trade – of course, with England. But the Spanish patriots resented this occupation, aware of how few English there actually were, and the ‘Reconquista’ (echoing the Christian recovery of Spain from the Moors) began. ree men led the counter-attack: the aristocratic French naval officer Santiago de Liniers (1753–1810), who had married into a criollo family; Martín de Álzaga (1755–1812), a Basque-born trader and the mayor of Buenos Aires; and Juan Martín de Pueyrredón (1777–1850), with his tough gaucho cavalry. ey slowly forced the English army into retreat, first into the octagonal brick amphitheatre of the Retiro bullring (now the plaza San Martín), pulled down in 1821, and finally into the fort and cabildo, before they surrendered. José María Ramos Mejía (1842–1914), a doctor and writer, evoked in his book Las multitudes argentinas (1899) the dense smoke from gunpowder, the agonized screams of the dying in the ditch-like streets. The occupation had lasted 47 days and the Plaza Mayor was renamed Plaza de la Victoria (Victory Square). Beresford escaped, and later fought with Wellington in Spain. Liniers became the interim viceroy, voted in by the Audiencia (Spanish Crown Court). e latter had rejected Sobremonte, the incumbent since 1804, who had abandoned

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his post. at the people had the temerity to dismiss a virrey and bypass the Spanish Crown increased local pride and power. According to Vicente Quesada, the black slaves showed such enthusiasm in this fight that 70 out of 686 were freed in a kind of lottery. Inevitably, the British refused to accept the humiliating defeat and sent a fleet out commanded by Admiral Popham himself. ey took Montevideo and landed at Ensenada de Barragán (off today’s city of La Plata) on 28 June 1807 with 8,400 soldiers. Instead of shelling the city, General John Whitelocke ordered his infantry, with muskets but no artillery, down the narrow, grid-like streets. e English encountered a militia and popular resistance that decimated them, with over 300 English dead and thousands wounded (and 170 deserters). From the flat rooftops and windows, boiling oil, musket shots and stones were loosed on the hapless soldiers. Whitelocke

The Pirámide in Plaza de Mayo today.

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soon surrendered. He had expected to be seen as a saviour. Back in England, he was court-martialled in June 1808. Popham, also court-martialled, was pardoned. at a militia and a mob had repulsed the might of Perfidious Albion created a unique porteño spirit of defiance that planted seeds of independence. e repulsion of the English was called the ‘Defensa’. You can still see shell and musket marks on Santo Domingo’s church tower (corner of Avenida Belgrano and Defensa). e church had been recaptured by General Crawford (under Whitelocke), who had hoisted the previously captured British ensigns, but when he was defeated the ensigns were restored as a trophy of victory inside the church. Much of this church was destroyed during the Peronist uprising of 1953. Nevertheless, even if the English were ousted, their trade soon dominated the region. Few buildings have lasted from this viceregal period of 1776–1810. One, a private house with its three inner patios, is the Museo Mitre (on San Martín, 336), dating from 1746 with rebuildings, where the last virrey Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros (1759–1829), who had replaced Liniers in 1809, lived. It has been preserved thanks to the influence of General Bartolomé Mitre (1821–1906), first president of the Provincias Unidas – as Argentina was then known – from 1862 and founder of the newspaper La Nación in 1870, still edited by a Mitre. He was a respected historian and a translator of Homer and Dante. His library, housed in the Museo Mitre, of some 70,000 tomes is invaluable for historians. Plaza Bartolomé Mitre, near the British Embassy residence, commemorates him in bronze on horseback in a work by Eduardo Rubino and David Calandra (1927). Mitre lived a long, active life, meddling in politics. General Roca, twice president of Argentina, considered him Argentina’s ‘first citizen’. e defensive tunnels built by the Jesuits in what is called ‘La Manzana de las Luces’ (block of learning), which can be visited on Perú, 272, are a relic of the late eighteenth century. e tunnels, found by accident in 1912, could also have been used by smugglers and remain mysterious. On this Jesuit block stands the great Colegio Nacional (created by Mitre in 1863

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President Mitre’s house on san Martín, 6.

where the earlier Colegio Seminario y de Ciencias Morales of 1818 stood), on Bolívar, 263. e current building was designed by Norbert Maillart in 1908 and completed in 1938. Bernardino Rivadavia (1780–1845), briefly the first president of Argentina from 1826–7, founded the first university of Buenos Aires in 1821 on the same site. e Jesuit church tower of San Ignacio on Alsina (named after Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola), begun in 1608 on Jesuit Jan Kraus’s design and rebuilt three times, was used as a lookout to warn of pirates. Its facade and southern bell tower of 1734 compete as the oldest surviving building in Buenos Aires. A side effect of the expulsion of Jesuits from all the Spanish colonies in 1767 was the opening of a printing press from their Candelaria missionary in Misiones, which had started printing books in 1700 when printing was still banned in the rest of the Spanish colonies. It was brought to Buenos Aires in 1780. In the

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san ignacio church on Bolívar.

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Manzana de las Luces (Block of Enlightenment) at the corner of Perú and Moreno, it functioned as the ‘Imprenta de los Niños Expósitos’ (Press of the Orphaned Children), publishing the city’s first newspaper, El Telégrafo Mercantil, in 1780. Nearby is the Museo de la Ciudad on Defensa 219, portraying porteño life in detail. e Museo owns the Altos (meaning twofloored house) de Ezcurra, built in 1801 on Alsina 455, where Belgrano’s mistress María Josefa Ezcurra lived; she was sister to Encarnación, the plotting wife of the tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877). e house was painted red and appears in the novel Amalia (1851) by José Mármol. In 1900 it was converted into shops, then fell into disrepair and is only now being restored. More recently, in 1985, further tunnels were located by accident on Defensa, 755, nearby, in a privately funded archaeological dig called El Zanjón de Granados, where an underground stream was canalized with adobe walls dating back to 1730. It could have been the site of the 1536 landing. In the wake of Garay’s second foundation of the city, cattle multiplied on the pampas, leading to the gargantuan meateating habits of the porteños. By the Viceroyalty of 1776 there were three slaughterhouses, which have, over time, also moved. e South was where today’s Plaza España is. e Central was on today’s Plaza Miserere, by the Once station where Rivadavia’s mausoleum now stands, with its jacarandas. e North lay on the junction of Avenida Las Heras and Avenida Pueyrredón, a dangerous area known as ‘Tierra del Fuego’. In all cases, these open fields of gore witnessed cattle butchered by gauchos with long knives (facón). Most travellers noted the stench, piles of bones, scavenging seagulls and dogs. In 1900, the slaughterhouses were concentrated in Liniers, outside the city proper – named after the hero of the Reconquest and today re-baptized as ‘Little Bolivia’. Slave trading was a source of local wealth and trade. e British South Sea Company opened its trading post on today’s Plaza San Martín in 1720 and introduced around 20,000 Africans in exchange for hides. Every European family had slaves, mainly from the Congo and Angola. For example,

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Jean léon Pallière, The Matadero, c. 89.

Liniers was awarded 2,000 slaves for his ‘heroism’ in ejecting the English in 1807. In 1810 African-Argentines constituted 29 per cent of the city’s population (11,837), but by 1900 there were few left. In 1812 trading slaves was forbidden and in 1853 slavery was outlawed. However, in 1831 Rosas temporarily reintroduced the importation of slaves, due to lack of a workforce. e freed slaves remained urban and tended to work as servants in the city. As a group, they were devoted to the tyrant Rosas and were rewarded as spies in Rosas’s war against the Europeanizing liberals. Debate revolves around what happened to them. Some argue that they joined up in the Argentine liberation and civil wars of the 1820s and later in the Paraguayan war of 1865–70 and were killed as cannon fodder; others that countless died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1871. Some survived in Monserrat, the city’s first barrio (in the centre) and named ‘barrio de los tambores’ (neighbourhood of the drums) because African-Argentine drummers lived there.

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3 independence City, 1810 and repercussions

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T

he Viceroyalty ended with a revolution. The English invasions had shown the people their independence from distant Spain. Napoleon invaded Spain in February 1808. Dissolute Carlos iv took refuge in Aranjuez and under pressure abdicated in favour of his son, who became Ferdinand vii and was wanted by the people. Both were called to France, where Napoleon demanded they renounce the throne. On 5 May they agreed. Napoleon then installed his drunkard brother Joseph, known as ‘Pepe Botella’ (‘Joe Bottle’), already king of Naples, as emperor. e Cádiz junta, the Spanish government in exile, appointed Cisneros as the new virrey in Buenos Aires, but this junta fell in 1808 and the colonies then no longer had a king or virrey representing them. is absence of monarchical authority pushed the porteños to create their own junta of 225 eminent men and run their own country. ey sacked Cisneros. In this partial revolution, hardly a drop of blood was spilled. e coup was decided by a cabildo abierto, an open forum of the city’s literate stalwarts of about 200 men, who argued and voted in the first-floor galleries of the cabildo on today’s Plaza de Mayo. e original cabildo was built in 1608 with mud bricks and was also a prison. It was knocked down and rebuilt on two floors in 1751 by Jesuit architects Juan Primoli (1673–1747) and Andrés Blanqui, with a clock tower added in 1762, its bell cast in Cádiz. From 1849 to 1894 its clock regulated time for all the city’s clocks. Italianized by Pedro Benoit (1836–87) in 1879, it lost three arches in the making of the Avenida de Mayo in 1894 and three more in 1931 for the Diagonal. After research, Mario Buschiazzo (1902–1970, nephew of Juan Buschiazzo) restored it to its colonial style in 1940.

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From 22 to 25 May 1810 – now one of Argentina’s public holidays – a genuine revolution began. One of the intellectual leaders was Mariano Moreno (1778–1811), translator of JeanJacques Rousseau and a member of La Logia Lautaro (a Masonic Lodge, named after a Mapuche resistance hero in Alonso de Ercilla’s epic poem Araucana of 1590). e historian Nicolas Shumway describes Moreno as short, highly strung, badly disfigured by smallpox and both a devout, authoritarian Catholic and an Enlightenment libertarian, almost a Jacobin, who promised the elimination of enemies – the first in a long line of leaders unable to compromise with whoever thought differently. He wanted free trade with England and confused the city of Buenos Aires with Argentina. Colonel Cornelio Saavedra (1759–1829), Moreno’s opponent, was commander of the Patricios regiment and believed in the provinces. He became president of the first junta from 25 May to 18 December 1810, with Moreno its secretary (though they still swore allegiance to Ferdinand vii). Two other Freemasons, Domingo French (1774–1825) and Antonio Beruti (1772–1841) – now two streets in the ‘Barrio Norte’ – distributed white ribbons during the cabildo meeting, previously worn during the English invasions. ey handed a petition to the junta who then asked the crowd for their approval. e first junta of this just-born country lasted a short time; there was a second, then two triumvirates and then between 1814 and 1820 there were seven ‘Supreme Directors’ (four in 1815 alone) – obvious chaos. Interestingly, most of the people involved remained monarchists. Moreno sailed to Europe to find a monarch. e Portuguese infanta Carlota was suggested. On 20 June 1820, there was the farce of three governors in Buenos Aires on one day. e new country was baptized in 1810 as the Provincias Unidas in a federal structure similar to the United States of America. e historian John W. White noted that no other country had been known by so many names, yet ‘Argentina’ had been in use from 1813. By 1815 the word ‘Argentina’ resounds in the national anthem and by 1826 was common. Revolutionary fervour abolished slavery and aristocratic titles, demolished escutcheons, called asambleas for its male ‘citizens’,

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even wiped the king’s image off coins – what historian Ernesto Palacio called an ‘egalitarian fury’. Meanwhile, Spanish royalist forces still fought everywhere else in South America, winning at Rancagua in Chile, for example. Only in 1814 did General San Martín, Argentina’s reticent, selfless hero, of which more below, crosssed the Andes in a feat of endurance to surprise and defeat the Spaniards at Chacabuco in today’s Chile. Simón Bolívar didn’t liberate Colombia until 1819, and Venezuela and Bolivia until 1821 and 1824 respectively. José Antonio Wilde, doctor and historian, recorded how Bolívar’s general Antonio José de Sucre’s victory at Ayacucho in Peru (a street in Buenos Aires today) led to three days’ celebrations and Carnival. Porteños lived South American independence battles as their own. Historian James Scobie called the following decade in Argentina, from 1810, a ‘bewildering succession of juntas, triumvirates, congresses and directories’. e two French Revolutionary firebrands, Mariano Moreno (who died at sea, possibly poisoned) and Juan José Castelli (1764–1812, a fervent revolutionary who died, awaiting trial, of tongue cancer), were sidelined. Moreno had warned that heads would roll and blood flow. Castelli had decided the death of Liniers. Eventually two warring sides emerged, one backed by the Church and the other freethinking and European-inspired. It would become a civil war of federales representing the scarcely populated provinces and a federal republic against unitarios in Buenos Aires, who stood for progress and European ideas and were urban port dwellers. Independence from Spain was finally officially declared at a congress in the subtropical city of Tucumán on 9 July 1816, another national day. By 1821 the cabildo, where the revolution began, no longer counted as an institution, though the building remained, as noted. May 1810 was celebrated with a simple Columna de Mayo, known oddly as the Pyramid (when it’s an obelisk), in the renamed Plaza de Mayo. It was inaugurated on 25 May 1811 as the city’s first monument. In 1912, it was moved to the centre of the ‘plaza’ after modifications. Mario Binetti, an Argentine poet, calls this plaza ‘the patria’s heart’.

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Two victims of independence were the French-born, aristocratic Santiago de Liniers (the tenth interim viceroy), who had led the expulsion of the English and was popular with the people, and Martín de Álzaga. Liniers scandalized society with his affair with married Ana Perichon, nicknamed ‘La Perichona’. Defending Spain’s interests, he was captured by Castelli and executed in 1810 (anti-Napoleonic feelings ran high), becoming the first victim of Argentine violence. The modesty of the facade of his 1788-built home on Venezuela 469 in Montserrat has been preserved; this was where Beresford signed his surrender. Spanish-born ex-mayor Martín de Álzaga, already mentioned above as a hero of the ‘Reconquista’ against the English, was a rich trader who remained loyal to the Spanish Crown and defended the Spanish trade monopoly, but clashed with Liniers. He was arrested as a conspiring Spaniard and Rivadavia, secretary to the junta, ordered his execution. On 6 July 1812 he was shot by harquebus (portable, long-barrelled gun) on the Plaza Mayor (Plaza de Mayo). His corpse hung up for three days and he was finally buried in the Santo Domingo church. Álzaga’s death heralded the end of the colonial power structure; there is still debate about how fair his trial had been. Argentina’s most respected hero, the selfless and frank General José de San Martín (1778–1850), a professional soldier trained in Spain, was not directly involved in Buenos Aires politics. But in 1811 he met Manuel Moreno (1782–1857, brother of Mariano) during a short trip to London and changed sides, becoming both a revolutionary and a traitor. He brilliantly organized an independence army, crossed the Andes in 1816, freed Chile in 1817 and then freed Peru in 1821. In July 1822 he famously met Bolívar in Guayaquil, Ecuador, sweeping down from the north. What they parleyed has never been revealed, but San Martín, a diehard monarchist, relinquished his leadership, gifting Bolívar his pistols, a shotgun and his horse. He then went into self-exile in Paris. San Martín once tried to return by ship to the chaos of Buenos Aires, but refused to land, finding the violence unacceptable. He wrote, ‘I would a 1,000 times rather perish in the turmoil

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general José de san Martín’s equestrian statue by louis-Joseph daumas, 86, on Plaza san Martín.

that threatens her than be the instrument of such horror.’ He did admire Rosas and presented his sabre to him. When San Martín died at his home in Boulogne, France (now a museum) only seven people attended the funeral. His modest Paris home was copied, but at twice the size, in Palermo Chico in Buenos Aires. Later he was placed, embalmed and draped in the Argentine flag, in a mausoleum in a chapel in Buenos Aires Cathedral. His bronze equestrian statue dominates the lovely Plaza San Martín named after him (previously known as El Retiro). Sculpted by Frenchman Louis-Joseph Daumas in 1862 and raised on a plinth by the German sculptor Gustav Heinrich Eberlein, the general, on his rearing horse, points towards the

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Andes, which he had heroically crossed. e location of this first equestrian statue in the city is a ceremonial centre because that’s where San Martín trained his grenadiers. Plaza San Martín, honouring the general, is looked on to by some of the city’s grandest buildings, such as the ex-Palacio Paz (now Palacio Retiro), begun in 1909 with French-born architect Louis-Marie Sortais (1860–1911) in imitation of the Château de Chantilly and finished 22 years later, though Sortais never visited Argentina. Its owner, José C. Paz, founder of the newspaper La Prensa, died in 1912 in Monte Carlo. e city’s largest private house, it is shaped in three wings (its plot was not a square) with 38 bedrooms and 18 bathrooms in 12,000 sq. m of space. In 1938 it was sold to the state as the visitable Círculo Militar. Across Avenida Santa Fe stands the vast ex-Palacio Anchorena (now Palacio San Martín) at Arenales 761, designed by Alejandro Christophersen (1866–1946) in 1902 and completed in 1909 as a family home, with vast, wrought-iron gates. From 1936 it was the Foreign Office and today it is used for ceremonial and diplomatic events. On another corner of the Plaza San Martín, at the top of Florida, stands the Paris-inspired Plaza Hotel (designed by Alfred Zucker (1852–1913), who also built St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York), opened in 1909. At that time it dominated the buildings around. For ages the grandest hotel in town, its Grill Room hasn’t altered. South of the plaza, the tall, modernist Kavanagh Building stands out. is iconic art deco tower, built in 1936, remains the tallest (at 120 m, 30 floors) reinforced concrete building in South America. At its top there is an astronomical observatory. Each of the 105 flats has its own elevator so owners need never meet neighbours, and the building has its own telephone system and water supply. Built in fourteen months, it was named after Corina Kavanagh (1894–1984), who lived on the fourteenth floor. Her Martínez house in northern Buenos Aires was, until recently, the French ambassador’s residence. Further Rationalist skyscrapers of the 1930s include the Edificio Comega at Avenida Corrientes 222 and Edificio Safico, designed by Swiss

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engineer Walter Möll (1881–1957), at Avenida Corrientes 456. Ensconced behind the Kavanagh tower is the baroque Basílica del Santísimo Sacramento on San Martín 1039, built by Sra Anchorena as her chapel-tomb, with red onyx from Morroco, Carrara marble and other foreign exotica. e story goes that her rival Sra Kavanagh built her skyscraper to spoil the tomb’s view of the Anchorena palace across the plaza. At the foot of Plaza San Martín’s grassy slope today stands the Monumento a los Caídos en Malvinas, designed by the architect Andrés Morán in black marble and citing the 649 Argentines who died in the Malvinas/Falklands war of 1982. e plaza’s tall, shade-giving jacarandas, lapachos and acacias, along with its benches and grass, witness porteños relaxing and chatting. A short street called Cabral, off the plaza, reminds porteños of Juan Bautista Cabral, who saved San Martín’s life in a battle with the Spaniards. He’d fallen from

The grand Plaza hotel (now a Marriott), which opened in 909.

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his lanced horse and was being dragged away when Cabral got killed instead. e constitution was formally declared in 1853. But this new country was not well defined geographically. What was termed the frontier lay barely outside today’s Greater Buenos Aires. e Pampa peoples, often allied with other tribes, constantly invaded homesteaders in a malón – hundreds of Indians with lances on horseback, the word derived from the augmentative for mal or evil – killing off men, stealing horses and cattle and kidnapping women and children, the famous cautivas (kidnapped white women) of urban lore. For example, the malón of the Pampa cacique, or leader, Juan Calfucurá, slaughtered over 300 families, kidnapped some 150 cautivas, and rustled 60,000 horses and cattle. e astute Calfucurá headed the Confederación Araucaria, a grouping of indigenous tribes, defeated General Mitre in the battle of Sierra Chica in 1855 and lived well into his nineties. is frontier past is not

The striking art deco Kavanagh Building, 96.

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visible in the city, but skirmishes with indigenous people and abundant animal killing during the nineteenth century help explain how the throat-cutting habits of indigenous Argentines (they refused to take male prisoners, so cut their throats) crossed over with the gauchos and their montonero (gangs of tough horsemen) hordes, often composed of indigenous people and mestizos, who would invade Buenos Aires in 1820 under leaders like Francisco ‘Pancho’ Ramírez (1786–1821). e authoritarian Juan Manuel de Rosas tried to calm the situation by talking to the indigenous groups. He learned their language, even collated in manuscript a Pampa dictionary. From his experience with indegenous people, Rosas learned to fight the ‘anarchy’, in his words, of the 1820s with notions of order and discipline, yoking the Church to his side. Short, tubby Bernardino Rivadavia (1780–1845), an intellectual and aristocrat of part African descent married to a viceroy’s daughter, gave his name to the longest avenue in Buenos Aires, the city’s backbone, where street names change as they cross it. He was a utopianist but, as the writer Leopoldo Marechal (1900–1970) noted, his utopian dreams came true. Rivadavia has been derided as having sold out to the British, as a pro-Europeanizer who despised America. He was at first a monarchist then a Benthamite (indeed, a personal friend to Jeremy Bentham) and always an Anglophile, who in 1826 – for eighteen months – became president. A government minister from 1821, he was the dominant voice of that decade. In 1826 Buenos Aires was declared the capital of Argentina. Rivadavia set up the first medical school and offered the French botanist Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858), companion of the Prussian scientific explorer Alexander von Humboldt on his travels in South America, its first chair, though when Bonpland arrived in Buenos Aires in 1819 he discovered no building and no money. (Bonpland is now a street in Belgrano, parallel to Humboldt, who never visited the city.) After Bonpland was imprisoned in Paraguay by its dictator Francia, the post was offered to Javier Muñiz (1795–1871), a palaeontologist who corresponded with Charles Darwin and died in the yellow fever plague of 1871.

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Naturally, the science museum is named the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia, on Avenida Gallardo 470. Rivadavia also founded the city’s university in 1821 and insisted on it being free of Church interference. He was so anticlerical that he suppressed monasteries and convents and confiscated much church property. In 1822 he planned three cemeteries outside town, insisting that all faiths could be buried there. e first, the Cementerio del Norte, opened that year. He also set up the still-existing charity called the Sociedad de Beneficiencia, which distributed clothes and food to the poor and was run by eminent society women – in fact, Rivadavia believed that women should guide men in terms of behaviour and manners. He founded a Music Academy in 1822, appointing Italian-born Virgilio Rabaglio as director, and abolished the cabildo, symbol of Spanish rule; Spaniards were even forbidden to marry criollas between the years 1817 and 1820, according to Wilde. Rivadavia tried to set up the state from nothing. He was the first to promote immigration as an answer to the country’s empty spaces (land occupied by nomadic Indian people who both rode, and ate, horses). He wanted small landowners and crop farmers and planned to grant them public land, but he clashed with the estanciero (an estanciero is an owner of an estancia, or ranch) and lost out to their leader, Rosas. Apart from Bonpland, Rivadavia lured further European intellectuals like the Naples-born Pedro de Angelis (1784– 1867), tutor to Carolina Bonaparte’s children in Sicily, who arrived in 1827 to run the state printing press, became the country’s first historian and in 1830 wrote an eighteen-page biography of Rosas. César Hipólito Bacle (1794–1838), artist and lithographer, arrived in 1825 from Geneva; he was accused by Rosas of being a spy, was imprisoned and died in 1838. French-born Charles Henri Pellegrini (1800–1875), an engineer, built the first opera house, El Colón, on the main square, today’s Plaza de Mayo, with iron girders shipped out from England and room for 2,500 people (since demolished); he was also a gifted portraitist.

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The Casa amarilla on av. almte Brown.

To deal with street crimes, Rivadavia, who planned all his projects from scratch, also banned the carrying of knives. Wilde wrote: ‘We have a black stain – the use of knives.’ However, street violence still threatens, only today it is with guns and motochorros (motorbike-riding thieves). Rivadavia’s ashes were brought back from Cádiz, where he’d died in 1845 after being exiled by his political enemies, in 1857, but a monument on Plaza Once de Septiembre, named after the date on which General Mitre forced José Urquiza (on whom, see later text) out of Buenos Aires in 1862, was not planned until 1928; the plaza was also known as Miserere. e monument was inaugurated in 1932, complete with Rogelio Yrurtia’s bronze sculptures of Moses, a figure of ‘action’ and reliefs of Rivadavia. Inside the huge granite

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LA PeriChonA And CAmiLA o’gormAn Santiago de Liniers, hero of the Reconquista of the city and interim virrey, had a scandalous affair with the Frenchwoman Ana Perichon (1775–1847), nicknamed ‘La Perichona’. She was a spy for the english and would dress as a Spanish soldier and mock and joke with them. She fled with the defeated english to Brazil. The outraged mayor of Buenos Aires, Martín de Álzaga, let her return, but under house arrest. La Perichona’s grand-daugher Camila O’Gorman ran off with her priest lover Ladislao Gutiérrez in 1847. They fell in love when he was a priest in the Socorro, a simple eighteenth-century church still standing off Suipacha, with its paved plaza. The couple settled incognito in Goya, on the Paraná, and ran a school for five months until their whereabouts was discovered. Rosas could not stand ‘licentiousness and disorder’ and commanded Camila’s execution. After she was found and brought to Santos Lugares (Rosas’s military headquarters, barracks and prison), Manuela Rosas pleaded her case and had books and a piano installed in her cell. But Rosas was in a hurry and within two days had the lovers shot, on 18 August 1848. Camila had such heavy chains on her feet she had to be carried to the execution wall and placed on the seat. The first volley of bullets missed and one soldier fainted. The second volley saw one bullet slice her arm and she screamed, hiding behind her long hair. The third riddled her with bullets. Camila was eight months pregnant. Sir Horace Rumbold, British Chargé d’Affaires, called it ‘the blackest of all crimes, greatly hastening Rosas’s downfall’. Domingo Sarmiento commented that all Buenos Aires ‘froze in horror’ at the shooting. He noted that the lovers were buried in the same coffin and that it was a triple crime in that Camila’s unborn baby, inevitably baptized (being Catholics), also died. Camila has come to stand for all women suffering under oppression. Cover of felisberto Pelissot, Camila O’Gorman (857).

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crypt lie his ashes. is strange mausoleum is covered in graffiti and few porteños know what it stands for. One of the adventurers thrown up by the hectic 1820s was an Irish merchant seaman who became Argentina’s first admiral: William (Guillermo) Brown (1777–1857). He reached Argentina in 1810, just before the May revolution, and took charge of the fledgling nation’s fleet. He also recaptured Martín García, imperial Spain’s last island outpost. Made an admiral in 1814, he challenged the far-larger Brazilian fleet in the battle of Juncal (an island on the Uruguay River and a Buenos Aires street) in 1825, watched from the city. en he turned pirate, attacking Spanish ships along the Pacific coast, but was caught and imprisoned. After escaping, he stood as governor of Buenos Aires for some months in 1828. Brown took to the freshwater sea against the French blockade in 1838 and defeated Garibaldi in 1842, though they became friends. In 1827, his seventeen-year-old daughter Eliza drowned herself in the Riachuelo, a local Ophelia in white wedding dress, when she learned that her betrothed had died in a sea battle. ere is a plaza named after her in the city district of Barracas, and she is buried in the Recoleta. Brown, an abstemious, theatrical man, loved dressing up as an admiral. His reconstructed, glaringly orange house – known as La Casa Amarilla (see p. 61) – stands out on the avenue named after him that leads into La Boca, as does his green tomb with ship in the Recoleta. Argentina’s first battleship of 1880 was named the Almirante Brown. Mention of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), born in Nice, a flamboyant corsair and mercenary with long fair locks and red beard, leads to a focal equestrian statue in the city. He rides his horse without his equally dashing, illiterate Brazilian wife Anita (whom he had carried off adulterously). Dressed as a man, she fought side by side with Garibaldi. Garibaldi, known for the poncho that he wore all his life, lived in South America from 1836 to 1848 and in 1843, in Montevideo, formed the Italian Redshirt Legion. His equestrian statue, donated in 1904 and sculpted by Eugenio Maccagnani, stands on Plaza Italia, a hectic roundabout

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with entrances to the Zoo, the Botanical Gardens and the Sociedad Rural Argentina (founded in 1866), and which hosts the annual agricultural fair and the Feria del Libro (book fair). Oddly, Garibaldi never landed at Buenos Aires.

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4 The Civil War City and rosas, 1829–80

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A

lcides d’Orbigny (1802–1857), a French naturalist who spent ten years travelling South America, moaned in 1826 about ‘total anarchy’. A gory civil war had been waging from 1828 (and would last for 40 years), when the impetuous general Juan Lavalle overthrew the popular Manuel Dorrego in Argentina’s first military coup. Dorrego had been elected governor of Buenos Aires in 1827, replacing President Rivadavia. According to the historian John Lynch, he was a man of peace and moderation. In 1829, Lavalle had Dorrego shot without trial. Dorrego’s execution (there’s a sculpture of him on horseback by Rogelio Yrurtia on Suipacha and Viamonte) was never forgiven by Rosas and was the reason he was asked to step in to rule in 1829. After a year, Dorrego’s corpse was exhumed and taken from the city’s fort to the cathedral, accompanied by a band playing Mozart and followed by a crowd. He was buried in the Recoleta cemetery. Shumway called his assassination ‘the most tragic error in Argentine history’. Rosas’s foe Lavalle, the dashing darling of the times, joined the liberator San Martín when he was fifteen, crossed the Andes with the army and was wounded at the battle of Suipacha. In the historian Carlos Ibarguren’s words, he was ‘restless and impulsive, sarcastic and rebellious’. He was also needlessly violent. About the civil war Lavalle had said: ‘There are two equally strong parties. For one to win decisively, it must “degollar” [cut the throat of ] the other one.’ Such constant severing of heads marked the period. Indeed, Marcos Avellaneda (1813–1841), a brilliant orator, journalist and lawyer, was arrested by Rosas in 1841 in Tucumán, a city in the north of

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Plaza lavalle and the lavalle Monument.

Argentina, and was degollado. Rumours claimed that his severed head went on talking and blinking for ten minutes. This assassination shocked all Buenos Aires. Avellaneda’s son would become Argentine president in 1874. Another famous incident of civil war violence was when General Prudencio Ortiz de Rozas, Rosas’s brother, captured the revolutionary lawyer Pedro Castelli on 15 November 1839, severed his head and stuck it on a stake. But whether or not Lavalle contributed to the unremitting violence, he would not see the end of this civil war, as he was shot (some claim he committed suicide) in Jujuy in northern Argentina in 1840 while on the run. His corpse, stripped of its flesh and with head, beard and heart preserved in rum, was heroically taken by horse into the safety of Potosí in Bolivia rather than being beheaded and paraded. is skeleton and heart were then transferred to Valparaíso in Chile and only came back to Buenos Aires in 1861. Lavalle is now the name of a well-known pedestrian street and a central plaza, with his statue atop a column.

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e murder of Liniers horrified a young, tough estanciero called Juan Manuel Rosas (1793–1877), a brilliant horseman and the eldest of nineteen children who by the age of seventeen was running a model estancia called El Rincón. He became the caudillo (political boss) that the country needed. As noted, Rosas fought ‘anarchy’ with the Church on his side, demanding ‘blind obedience’, as he put it. His nickname was ‘restorer of order’ when he became governor of the Province of Buenos Aires in 1829. By this date Argentines had invented the national anthem, a flag and a national currency. Part of Rosas’s scheme was to purge the country of freemasons, liberals and intellectuals, most of whom were unitarios – his political enemies who believed in progress, were modernizers and wanted the port of Buenos Aires to run the country. Rosas relied for loyalty on black servants and washerwomen – who would work at the river and exchange gossip – and his not-so-secret police called the ‘Mazorca’ (a pun on mazorca ‘(corn) cob’ and más horca, ‘more gallows’), Rosas’s private militia of some 200 cut-throats,

fernando garcía del Molino (attrib.), Juan Manuel de Rosas, c. 850.

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who dominated city life between 1835 and 1852. Most unitarios chose exile across the fresh water in Montevideo, which Rosas kept under siege for twelve years from 1839 to 1851. Rosas’s federales stood for a federation of provinces, in a vague North American model instigated as the Pacto Federal in 1831. is civil war over the destiny of Argentina lasted from 1827 until 1880. Exiled in Southampton from 1852, Rosas died alone and miserable in 1877. To prove that you were a faithful supporter, Rosas decreed the wearing of a red ribbon (divisa punzó). Women tied red ribbons in their hair and on their breast. In 1842 it was ordained that all official documents had to have ‘Death to the Savage Unitarians’ printed on them. Even long sideburns and moustaches were facial federal signs. Night watchmen – serenos – called out the time every half-hour, adding ‘Death to the Savage Unitarians’. Such an effective propaganda machine maintained order through fear. English businessman Charles Darbyshire claimed that Buenos Aires had never been safer than under Rosas. John Lynch summarized that ‘red was everywhere’. Rosas had been barely involved in the struggles for independence. He had set up a saladero, a meat salting factory, in 1815; salt was essential for the export of jerked beef to slaves in Brazil (slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888). He also astutely realized that he had to learn to address the poor and display gaucho skills to secure a power base, just as he had previously learned the Pampa Indian language. In 1828 he pushed back the frontier with the Indian people and built forts in towns like Azul and Tandil; by 1833 he had gained some 200 sq. km for his patria. Rosas knew the Indian mind and was cunning and authoritarian, once advising his wife to ‘reward the poor’ because he relied on them, just as – later – would Perón with Evita. As governor of Buenos Aires, he was the Restorer of the rule of law. His vision of Argentina as based on huge estancias, rather than smallholdings, prevailed after defeating the Europeanizing Rivadavia. As John Lynch claimed, he remained nostalgic for the colonial order as a conservative authoritarian, based on blind obedience and ruthless punishment. Rosas boasted of wielding ‘a power more absolute

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Juan leon Pallière, Rosas’s Palace, Palermo, 86, lithograph.

than any monarch on his throne’. Popular Argentine historian Félix Luna called his policies ‘peasant realism’, a hatred of change. Since his death, Rosas has been used by nationalists as a hero and the model of a founder, never more so than in the 1930s and ’40s. But he was also a porteño and defended Buenos Aires as the capital. Rosas is linked with the district of Buenos Aires known as Palermo. After the death of his wife Encarnación, he built a mansion for himself and his daughter Manuela, designed by Spanish-born Felipe Senillosa (1779–1853), who also planned the city’s riverside walk, the Paseo de la Alameda. Rosas refused to live in ba’s fort. By then it was falling into ruins, its moat a rubbish dump. It would be associated with the Spaniards and finally pulled down rather than restored as a ‘monument’ – another deleting of the past. Rosas married young (aged twenty), after his novia (fiancée) Encarnación had faked pregnancy (she was eighteen). ey lived in town on Moreno and Belgrano (refashioned in 1858 by his nemesis Domingo Sarmiento into a grand school, Catedral al Sur). is home, strangely called La Biblioteca (e Library), was a public meeting place, for the Rosases had no time for domesticity. Before Encarnación’s early death, the couple had two surviving children. en, as a widower, Rosas and daughter Manuelita (the affectionate diminutive of Manuela) lived frugally from 1848 in his

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rectangular, white-stuccoed Palermo palace, with its sixteen bedrooms and four towers. Today, all that remains of the palace are its gardens, now a park named after the date of his defeat in 1852, Tres de Febrero. Rosas fenced in these gardens, planted groves of orange and peach trees, let ostriches roam and built a boating pond. Inside the palace, dinner would be offered to guests who were entertained by Rosas’s ‘buffoons’, the most famous today being the dwarf Don Eusebio. W. H. Hudson witnessed him dressed as a general in scarlet, wearing a huge scarlet three-cornered hat with immense aigrettes of scarlet plumes and accompanied by a bodyguard of twelve scarletdressed cut-throats. Nobody dared laugh; Rosas had a black sense of humour. Darbyshire reported that while Manuelita was playing the piano, Rosas appeared with a plate that had two ears on it, saying, ‘Here are the ears of a savage Unitarian.’ Manuelita simply covered the plate with a sheet of music and played on. But not a brick of the palace now stands as Domingo Sarmiento, later president, dynamited the hated building in 1874, drained the marshy land on which it had stood and planted European trees (well, one brick has been recovered and is mounted on a plinth in Palermo Park). e palace had been located more or less under Rodin’s 1900 statue of Sarmiento. An English visitor to the palace in 1852 described it as ‘only one room high’ and ‘surrounded with a lot of porticoes’. It lay on flat land ‘with a grove of miserable-looking trees between it and the water’, meaning the River Plate. Lucio Mansilla, writer and nephew of Rosas, noted his uncle’s austere bedroom, with shiny tiles, a pine bed covered in a red bedspread, a red bed table, a red chair and – in the middle of the room – a small mahogany table with a red cloth and two candleholders with sperm-whale wax candles and red shades. Vicente Quesada said even window and door frames and pavement posts were painted red and women had no ‘freedom of colours’ for their clothes. Rosas was tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed and pale. He had a large nose and thin lips. To Darbyshire he looked like an English farmer. Rosas once read Mansilla a document, repeating

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a surviving brick from the demolished rosas palace.

auguste rodin, Monument to Sarmiento, 900.

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aloud: ‘Death to the Salvajes Unitarios! Death to Urquiza!’ (who would defeat him a year later). It was common knowledge that Rosas worked all night, exhausting his secretaries. He couldn’t delegate and examined every detail himself. When Charles Darwin was granted an interview with the tyrant he noticed that he never once smiled. Rosas, so meticulous about details, a hard taskmaster, got up at three in the afternoon and then worked solidly through the night sipping yerba maté (a bitter, caffeine-rich herbal drink, passed round in its gourd and with a straw – both sometimes silver-plated). He always ate the same simple food: a puchero (stew) and asado (grilled meat) – a diet that epitomized the national identity. Gallardo remembered this monotonous menu as a daily habit. In his memoirs Quesada recalled that the puchero was typical colonial food until after Rosas’s exile, when French cuisine took over. During the colonial period and Rosas’s regime, maté was the drink rather than coffee, so that in culinary terms Rosas continued the colonial customs, an enemy of modernity. He was self-taught, with no time for theories or books, despite being an avid dictionary reader and penning a manual on how to run a farm in 1825. Juan Bautista Alberdi, a lawyer and philosopher, admired Rosas’s ‘spontaneous intelligence’, freed from imported theories. He is a living myth, a pre-Perón, with ‘Rosas vuelve’ (Rosas returns) often scrawled on walls by later admirers. Argentina’s vicious nineteenth-century civil war comes alive in the Romantic poet Esteban Echeverría’s rough draft of a short story, ‘El Matadero’ (e Slaughter Yard), found among his papers after his death. It is set between 1838 and 1840 during Rosas’s two-year compulsory mourning for his wife Doña Encarnación Ezcurra (she died on 19 October 1838; she had married in 1813). She was the schemer behind his rule, characterized by Carlos Ibarguren as ‘ugly, man-like, violent’, and she swore like a trooper. Rosas blindly trusted all her whims. She drew up the lists of those enemies to have their throats cut and would also visit the poor and give presents, as Evita did later, making sure they reported on enemies. It was Encarnación who founded the dreaded Mazorca. e murder of

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Colonel Maza and his son in 1839 by the Mazorca set the tone for dealing with the internal enemy. Doña Encarnación was 43 years old when she died and over 25,000 people followed her hearse and corpse (wrapped in her characteristic red satin dress). ese people were hatless and holding lighted candles (just as later crowds lined up to pay homage to Evita). Doña Encarnación was the Patroness of the mataderos. Rosas had written to her not to ‘trust or believe any man who used starched shirts and ties’. Darbyshire recorded a friend telling him that the driver of a cart with an awning passed by shouting ‘Sweet oranges from Paraguay’. When he peeped in, he saw freshly decapitated human heads in piles like oranges. When the nineteenth-century Argentine critic Juan María Gutiérrez found this story in manuscript, he noted in bleakly contemporary terms: ‘If this page had fallen into Rosas’s hands, its author would have been disappeared immediately.’ e story targets the Spanish Catholic Church and its alliance with Rosas as it takes place during Lent, when meat should not be eaten. Eating quantities of steaks is part of the Argentine identity: 115.9 kg per head in 1956 (but 65 kg in 2009, and the figure is falling). In the story, the slaughterers want to donate the best cut, the matahambre, to Rosas. e tale begins when an effete unitario, bitter enemy to the Rosas regime, arrives on horseback in the matadero and the mob shout ‘Death to the savage Unitarios!’ is horseman is wearing neither the obligatory divisa punzó (red ribbon) nor mourning black (black tie, black armband, black ribbons in hat, worn by some as a sign of respect to Rosas) and is clean-shaven. at is, he is not respecting Rosas. He is sitting in an English saddle, like a foreigner. He is knocked off his horse, dragged to a shed and is about to be raped with a corncob when he dies in a rage. A corncob suggests the Mazorca, Rosas’s dreaded paramilitary force with their bull’s penis whips, more feared than Rosas himself. is story is so accurate about mob rule that it applies later to Peronism and the right-wing death squads of the 1970s. Even today’s piqueteros – tolerated street agitators who block streets and cause traffic chaos – invoke the Mazorca. Rosas has become

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an archetype of civil intolerance of the other and the matadero is a metaphor of his authoritarian rule. e year of ‘terror’ in Buenos Aires was 1840. José Mármol’s realist novel Amalia (1851), set in 1840, is historically reliable. He supported Lavalle’s coup and was arrested by Rosas, imprisoned and then exiled in Montevideo. His depiction of the Rosas tyranny appeared as weekly episodes in a newspaper, La Semana. Mármol gives a graphic account of Buenos Aires ruled by Rosas’s Mazorca, composed of Indians and gauchos. Under Rosas, violence was a solution to an argument; it was intolerance with a knife. e degüello or throat slitting avoided filling non-existent prisons with ideological enemies. Vicente Quesada remembered as a boy how empty and silent the streets were. In a recent newspaper article the historian Natalio R. Botana picked on intolerance, a refusal to share views, as an Argentine vice from the past. In the 1970s it was better to eliminate your enemies – an ‘old story dressed up in the clothes and language of new protagonists’. Historian John Lynch described this state of affairs: ‘It was impossible to be neutral in the struggle . . . one was either pro-Rosas or anti-Rosas.’ Such partisanship continues to dog politics. J. Anthony King, a young New Yorker who ran away to sea aged fourteen, landed in Buenos Aires in 1816 and became a high-ranking officer in the liberation and civil war battles. He wrote his book to expose the horrors and blood-spilling. King was warned not to allow himself to be captured alive as José Gervasio Artigas (radical liberator of Uruguay from Argentina in 1814) sewed his prisoners into hides and left them to die of thirst. General Ramírez, on the run, was trapped by ‘those butchers’ and, while he had his throat cut, stared at the young King with a look the latter would never forget. His head was then severed and shown as a trophy around the country. King cited statistics: 3,735 were degollados and 1,393 were shot. He calculated that Rosas had had some 22,404 people killed between 1829 and 1843, with most (some 14,920) being the result of the wars. Charles Darwin, in Buenos Aires in 1833, found Rosas’s ‘mixed-breed’ (as he called them) soldiers utterly ‘villainous’ but

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the man himself ‘extraordinary’, a ‘perfect’ horseman. e city was one of the most ‘regular’ in the world. e houses were all one floor high, with neat courtyards and flat roofs with seats, much frequented by the inhabitants on the hot summer nights. Darwin found the whole more beautiful than the parts. However, its population was expanding. Rosas’s census of 1836 had a population of 66,228, made up of 42,447 ‘whites’, 14,932 ‘blacks’, 4,000 foreigners and 849 soldiers. By 1855 it had some 90,000 and by 1880 some 286,000; as the country exploited its cattle industry by fencing off land and through refrigeration, European immigrants started to change the country. A snapshot of life during these sanguinary years is provided by a literary salón run by the sharp-minded Mariquita Sánchez de ompson (when her husband Martín ompson died she married the Frenchman de Mendeville). According to Pastor Obligado, she ran her salón at Florida 200 for over 50 years from 1806 to 1866, inviting every celebrity to her home. Mariquita Sánchez (1786–1868) was the lone daughter of a wealthy but austere criollo family. She shocked her parents when, aged fourteen, she chose romantically to marry the man she loved, rather than the man her parents wanted. She had to wait three years and get Church permission to marry her second cousin, Martín ompson. Present at the cabildo abierto (the forum for Bueno Aires’s male revolutionaries) of 10 May 1810, he was a member of the Masonic society La Logia Lautaro, which sought British help. at day of 1810 ‘electrified my heart’, Mariquita wrote, ‘my heart, my thoughts are with my patria, wretched and oppressed’. As the historian María Sáenz Quesada’s biography on Sánchez reveals, one of the great stories of these years was the composing and singing of the national hymn, ‘Oíd, mortales’ (‘Listen, Mortals’), in Mariquita’s drawing room in her mansion on Empedrado, the first paved street in the city, now Florida. Chilean painter Pedro Subercaseaux (1880–1956) recreated, decades later, Mariquita reciting the hymn, accompanied by a piano and a harp. e anthem was drafted in 1812, with a score by the Catalan Blas Parera, Mariquita’s music teacher, and words by

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López y Planes. It was first sung on 28 May 1813, though Mariquita never mentioned this salón happening. She became a widow after the death of De Mendeville and continued her salón in Montevideo, where she chose exile during Rosas’s long tyranny. She and Rosas addressed each other in the tú form; he called her ‘a little chatty, flirtatious Frenchwoman’, but she was a modernizer – the first in Buenos Aires to have her portrait taken in daguerreotype form in 1843 and madre intelectual to generations of thinkers. In 1852, Rosas was betrayed and finally defeated in the battle of Monte Caseros by his ex-general, José Urquiza (1801–1870), in what was essentially an internal struggle between federales, and Rosas escaped into exile near Southampton. Urquiza, an enlightened caudillo, had gathered together an army of 24,000, the largest in South America, appointing Sarmiento as official chronicler. But the porteños resented this ex-federal general and the civil war continued. General Urquiza settled in Rosas’s Palermo palace as president in 1854, then moved the capital of Argentina to the provincial town of Paraná, Entre Ríos. He organized the May 1853 constitution, based on Alberdi’s writings, unifying thirteen out of fourteen provinces, with Buenos Aires opting out. He fought and defeated his porteño enemies led by General Mitre in 1859, though he refused to sack the capital. He said: ‘I wish the children of Buenos Aires to be Argentines.’ Urquiza, the archetypal caudillo, dominated Entre Ríos. Ruthless in battle, he refused to take prisoners for there were no prisons. Methodical and austere, he didn’t smoke, drink alcohol or touch maté. Politically, he was a fierce defender of a federal state, against the capital Buenos Aires, and thus loyal to Rosas. But he is hard to pin down. As president, he lasted his six years, banning political executions, forbidding land confiscations and fomenting agriculture by stopping the import of wheat. He was an ardent educationalist, inviting eminent foreigners to teach in his famous school in Concordia. He was also a philanderer, who later recognized 108 illegitimate children in his will. Urquiza built a stunning palace called San José in Entre Ríos, with two towers, or miradores, one with a working clock and the other with a

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painted clock whose hands are stuck on the time of his murder. is was the first building to have running water in Argentina. It also had a French park with a Frenchman as head gardener. The ornate chapel has murals by the Uruguayan painter Juan Manuel Blanes (1830–1901) around its blue-tiled dome. Urquiza’s murder scandalized the country – Sarmiento labelled Urquiza ‘the new Rosas’, meaning a continuation of authoritarian government. e date 1852, then, is a symbolic one. e overthrowing of Rosas opened Argentina to the modern world, rejecting backwards Spain. When Rosas won power in 1829, there were 31 periodicals; by 1838, just one. He closed La Moda, the paper of the radicals known as the May Generation, including Echeverría. Rosas’s exile and Urquiza’s presidency guaranteed a free press and lifestyles that embraced progress. Only in 1958 was a monumento to Urquiza erected on a roundabout in Palermo (where Avenida Sarmiento meets Avenida Figueroa Alcorta), sculpted by Vittorio Renzo Baldi (1881–?) and finished by Héctor Rocha (1893–?), showing General Urquiza astride a horse, sword raised, and elevated on pinkish blocks with a relief below representing the battle of Caseros (1852). Chilean historian and traveller Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna (1831–1886) recorded Buenos Aires as it was in 1855, with its pyramid on Plaza de la Victoria (now de Mayo) as looking sad and the whole plaza muddy, despite the fact that South American independence had emerged on that plaza, as Argentina had led the way. e city still reflected its colonial past and wasn’t imposing like Mexico City; houses were low, flat-roofed and without street numbers, and the streets were narrow and muddy. He noted few churches and only two convents, thus grasping that the porteños were not devout. Even the Doriccolumned cathedral was profane – more like the Parthenon in Athens. Yet he sensed progress, with a large aduana (customs house) rising from the demolished fort and the first opera house finished in 1857 (and since demolished), opening with Verdi’s La Traviata (today’s Colón opened in 1908). Sir Richard Burton (1821–1890), traveller and translator of the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights, saw this grander city replacing

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the colonial backwater in 1868. e river-fronting promenade, the Paseo de Julio, lined with casuarina trees from Australia, was poorly lit and busy with whorehouses and sailors. e city itself had a ‘civic hurry and excitement’ (still has), with palazzi built by Italians and streets giving great vistas. Burton dedicated his book Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870) to Domingo Sarmiento’s presidency. He reminds us that Sarmiento’s nicknames were ‘Carapachay’ (a tree from the Paraná estuary islands), ‘El Loco’ (Madman) and ‘Don Yo’ (‘Mr Ego’). e two men met, exchanged books and agreed (in French) that education and immigration were the cures for the wars. Burton also met ex-president Mitre and was ‘astonished’ by his knowledge of books (housed in the Museo Mitre). He also attended the Colón opera house, but found it dingy and like a railway station (it was soon knocked down). Burton proclaimed Buenos Aires the ‘city of the future’ but also noticed its ‘impunity of crime’, an unchecked ‘affreuse tuerie’ (state of terrible slaughter) and utter disregard for human life. Many residents longed for the return of Rosas (and peace and order), and though Burton was against the death penalty, he thought some visible gallows might curb bloodlust. However, porteño General Bartolomé Mitre finally defeated the ‘federal’ Urquiza at the battle of Pavón in 1861, when Urquiza unaccountably retreated. Mitre became Argentina’s first

The aduana, the old customs house by eduardo Taylor, c. 890.

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president in 1862 (Urquiza governed from 1854 to 1860, but not Buenos Aires) and saw out his stipulated six years. But after Paraguay’s insane dictator Solano López (1827–1870) invaded the Argentine state of Corrientes on his way to battle with the Brazilians, Mitre was forced to take the country to a bitter, five-year War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70), decimating the male populations and particularly the officer class, including Sarmiento’s sole son. Mitre had fatuously promised it would be over in three months. If the city suffered plagues and diseases as a consequence of this protracted war, it also modernized itself with taxes, schools, currency and a national army. Mitre installed gas lighting, its first train (trains would transform the country), the aduana and telegraph wires. However, José Hernández (1834–1886), author of Martín Fierro, the popular narrative poem about a lawless gaucho, called him ‘the most malevolent entity known in these lands’ for the way he crushed the federales. Mitre handed over the presidency to Sarmiento in 1868, who also lasted his six years until 1874. He was followed by a young Nicolás Avellaneda, from 1874 to 1880. However, Mitre had sought another term and rebelled against Avellaneda, but his coup failed and he was court-martialled and sentenced to death in 1874. Luckily, he was pardoned. ese three presidents, elected by themselves and a tiny elite, oversaw the country’s transformation from an exporting economy dominated by trade in sheep to one centred on wheat (first exported in 1878) – Argentina became famed as ‘the granary of the world’. Wealth further increased with meat freezing from 1879, when a French freezer ship, La Frigorifique, docked and loaded up frozen meat for the first time. By 1882 two meat-freezing plants, frigoríficos, were at work. e flat pampas was soon divided by barbed wire into vast estancias, and salt factories were no longer needed. From the 1860s, Buenos Aires acquired its rising middle class – another difference from other Latin American cities like Lima, with its small white elite and large mestizo working class. e 1869 census gave Buenos Aires a population of 177,780, with foreign-born citizens comprising 47 per cent (but with 78 per cent of the overall population illiterate),

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CoLón oPerA house

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The second opera house gave Buenos Aires world prestige. The first one of 1857, on the Plaza de Mayo, went bankrupt, became the Banco de la Nación in 1888 and was demolished in 1944. The current opera house, Teatro Colón (it refers to Columbus), was due for completion in 1892 on the site of the first train station, Del Parque. But due to complications it didn’t open until the symbolic date of 25 May 1908. Francesco Tamburini initiated its design in 1891, but he died that year. italian-born Vittorio Meano took over, creating an eclectic building based on Milan’s La Scala, but he was murdered in 1904 by his butler, who was having an affair with his wife, so Jules Dormal completed it. it opened with a gala performance of Verdi’s Aida. The pinkish palace, with marble from Verona, has just been refurbished. its original red-plush seats, a huge chandelier with more than 700 lights and a vast mural by Raúl Soldi with 51 figures representing dance have turned it again into the snobbish hub that it once was. its main entrance is on Plaza Lavalle. Horseshoe-shaped seats accommodate 2,487 and there are 632 boxes; there is also standing room for thousands. A weird distinction are the ten boxes placed behind reja grilles, which were for widows and others who didn’t want to be seen. The space is acoustically superlative. As a symbol of grand Argentina, it was bombed by anarchists in 1910 during Jules Massenet’s Manon. Georges Clemenceau, the future French president, was shocked at the pools of blood and amazed how quickly everything was cleared up for the next night’s full-house performance.

The opera house, viewed from libertad.

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whereas Paris in 1889 had only 3 per cent foreign-born. A symbol of such sudden economic progress was the building of the government house, the Casa Rosada (Pink House), on top of the old fort on the Plaza de Mayo. When completed, Sarmiento had it painted red with whitewash and bull’s blood, hence the ‘Rosada’. A Swedish architect rebuilt one wing; the president General Roca had the north wing built by another Swedish architect in 1882 and then had the Italian-born architect Francesco Tamburini (1846–1891) join the two parts with the arch that’s the main entry, so that the three-storey building, once divided by a street, is not symmetrical – it is literally two parts pushed together in 1898. It’s called the Casa Rosada to vie with Washington’s White House. Although there were still no documents to prove your identity as an Argentine and elections were controlled by the elite and thus fraudulent, Buenos Aires was booming, thanks to its port. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888) was one of Argentina’s great men and the butt of much gossip about his increasing deafness and loud mouth. He was an ardent educationalist and journalist, setting up over 800 rural schools that would transform the country through literacy (high literacy levels would define Argentine differences from the rest of South America) and bind immigrants to their new land. Because, in 1869, 78.2 per cent of the immigrants were illiterate, education had a particularly urgent thrust: get the Italians (70 per cent of them) and the Spaniards (15 per cent) reading in order to turn them into Argentines. e 1884 education law assured free, secular and mandatory schooling. Sarmiento created the National Observatory, the School of Mining, the Military Academy and public libraries. He planted trees like the ubiquitous eucalyptus, brought over from Australia, founded the first zoo in 1875 (the current zoo was opened in 1903), created Palermo Park the same year and idiosyncratically introduced sparrows. As an author, he had formulated the country’s bitter dilemmas as early as 1845 with his pamphlet aspiring to be a biography of Facundo Quiroga (Rosas’s assassinated henchman) and titled ‘Civilization and Barbarity: e Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga’. Félix Luna, writing in the 1980s,

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La Casa Rosada, lithograph by Ángel della Valle, c. 90.

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deemed this murder of the brave Quiroga (already a legend in his time), at Barranca-Yaco, the most notable one in the nineteenth century and believed it was used by Rosas to justify his tyranny. Sarmiento’s tract, written in exile in Chile, argued for the Europeanization of the empty country through immigration, especially from the British Isles and Switzerland. Juan Bautista Alberdi ably backed this up with his maxim that ‘to govern is to populate’.

la Casa rosada from Plaza de Mayo.

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T h e C i V i l wa r C i T y a n d r o s a s , 89–80

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Sarmiento argued for the transfer of Argentina’s capital to the island of Martín García – the ‘lock’ for river traffic and the oldest granite outcrop in South America. He planned to call this new capital Argirópolis. Sarmiento also contributed to the general violence and had El Chacho Peñaloza, the populist governor of the northwestern province of La Rioja, murdered, his severed head stuck on a stake. He then wrote a book justifying this act. From 1875 to 1888, Sarmiento lived in a domed home with a mirador and high ceilings. It is now the Casa de la Provincia de San Juan, named after his home state, at Sarmiento 1251. He is buried in the Recoleta cemetery, under a bronze condor that he designed himself, and is remembered in the Museo Histórico Sarmiento in Belgrano (Avenida Juramento 2180) – Buschiazzo’s Doric-columned Belgrano town hall where, in 1880, President Avellaneda declared Buenos Aires a federalized part of Argentina. One of Sarmiento’s island huts from the Tigre delta, the estuary and its islands north of the city, is now a Museo Sarmiento, located off the Tigre’s Río Sarmiento. Another hut, on Isla Sarmiento in the same estuary, can also be visited. He loved these delta islands, and started a fashion for weekending there.

César hipólito Bacle, lithograph showing the execution of Quiroga’s assassins, Plaza de la Victoria (today Plaza de Mayo), 87.

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A church next to the Sarmiento Museo is known as La Redonda (‘e Round Church’, Parroquia de la Inmaculada Concepción) and was based on Rome’s Pantheon by Genoaborn architects Nicolás and José Canale. Juan Buschiazzo completed this round, fourteen-marble-columned church in 1878. Best seen from the outside (the inside is rather plain), it is the heart of the city’s Belgrano district, standing 43 m high and surrounded by tall trees, bars and a street market. e church figures in Ernesto Sábato’s novel Sobre héroes y tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs, 1961). Belgrano became a village in 1855, the capital for four months in 1880 and, from 1888, part of the city. Between 1850 and 1890 the city’s population increased by 600 per cent to some 450,000 inhabitants. A sign of this modernizing metropolis was the knocking down in 1884 of the Recova, built in 1803, to create one large plaza. e Recova comprised two series of twelve arches – with a clothes market underneath on one side and a food market selling meat, partridges and mulitas (armadillos) on the other – that divided the old Plaza de la Victoria from the Plaza 25 de Mayo. Prilidiano Pueyrredón (1823–1870, Argentine painter and architect) redesigned the new plaza with trees and plants. e city ceased to be treeless, as Sarmiento had linked trees with civilization. By 1853 there were horse-drawn buses or trams linking Retiro with the Plaza de Mayo. In 1857 a plan was hatched to pave all the streets with stones, then asphalt, even wood. e telegraph arrived in 1857 and the telephone in 1880. After some false starts, water and sewerage plans, under the Englishman John Bateman, began to be dug in. In 1871 San Telmo, in the south of the city, was hit by yellow fever induced by the female Aedes aegypti mosquito, brought over with slaves from Africa. ere was no cure and it was more lethal than malaria, primarily affecting cities. In 1867 and ’68 there had been cholera outbreaks, but the 1871 plague changed the city. A special train called the ‘Tren Fúnebre’ (Funeral Train) took corpses to the newly inaugurated (1874) Chacarita cemetery, as the Recoleta could not cope with so many dead. e story goes that the densely peopled Sur, or

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la redonda, Belgrano.

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‘south’ of the city, was abandoned by those who could move out to the Flores barrio on higher, healthier ground or to the area that became known as the ‘Barrio Norte’, the city north of the cathedral. In fact, death was out of control – up to 583 people died on the worst day in April. Following the plague’s devastation, the once-fashionable Sur was left to the new immigrants, but by the end of the twentieth century it had

alcides d’orbigny, View of the Recova, on Plaza de la Victoria (today Plaza de Mayo), 88.

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become fashionable again, with its Sunday market on Plaza Dorrego and along Defensa. is plague, according to historian Luqui Lagleyze, killed between 13,614 and 14,467 porteños out of a population of 190,000. Another sign of the surging demography were the multiroomed dockside slums known as conventillos (little convents/ tenements, so named because families lived in convent-like cells) that are still part of the city. Conventillo de la Paloma, named after a prostitute, has two entrances at ames 145/49 and Serrano 152/58 and was built around 1888 for 400 single immigrant workers at a shoe factory in Villa Crespo. Today it’s a protected building with some 60 residents from elsewhere in the country. In 1879 there were 1,770 conventillos housing 51,915 people – that is, one-fifth of the city lived in these cramped, one-roomed cells. A guidebook of 1895 called them

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Juan Manuel Blanes, An Episode of the Yellow Fever Epidemic in Buenos Aires, 87, oil on canvas.

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‘dreadful rookeries’. Luna has argued that they were better than the homes left behind in Europe and were temporary, multicultured and polyglottal microcosms of the immigrant city itself. ese boarding houses still exist in La Boca, but villas miserias (shanty towns) have now taken over; they have sprung up on city wastelands and along unused rail tracks – such as Villa 31, an area by the city’s bus terminal in Retiro, which grew out of the Villa Desocupación, a former shanty town from 1933. Over 30,000 live there, mostly from Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru, with their own music and markets. Villa 31 is being incorporated into the city as a new barrio. During the military dictatorship of the 1970s, the villas were flattened, but urban overflow pressure has recreated these pockets, which are blamed by locals for much of the city’s crime. e first proper map of Buenos Aires was made by Pedro Benoit in 1867, just as a new city began replacing the gran aldea, epitomized by Lucio V. López’s novel of the same name (1880). New sights included the main prison, the Penitenciaría Nacional on Avenida Las Heras, a panopticon with 704 cells built by Ernesto Bunge in 1877. In 1913 it held 790 prisoners but was demolished in 1962 and converted into the park Las Heras. Also new was the police headquarters, a whole block on Moreno/Ceballos and Belgrano with galleries and patios, designed by Buschiazzo, Bunge and Tamburini. Further new buildings included a grand, still-existing school from 1860 on Reconquista called Colegio Modelo de Catedral al Norte and hospitals like the Italiano (1862) and the Alemán (1876). e Museo Etnográfico Juan B. Ambrosetti (1874, Moreno 350) was built originally as the university’s law faculty (lawyers are a plague in Buenos Aires) by Pedro Benoit. (Ambrosetti was an anthropologist and writer.) It has kept its neoclassical, columned front and its tall palm tree. In the back patio, two large gomeros provide shade. By 1878 the city was divided into twelve parishes. e strangest parish church was Santa Felicitas, designed by Ernesto Bunge in 1875 in the Álzaga Quinta (the Álzaga residence; they were descended from Martín de Álzaga and were one of the country’s richest families), now on Montes de Oca. It was built in honour of

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their daughter, Felicitas Guerrero de Álzaga. She was a widow waiting out her two years of mourning before remarrying. She had rejected Enrique Ocampo, a besotted suitor who was out for her vast fortune. As documented in a letter cited by Victoria Ocampo, a distant relative, he turned up at her home on her wedding day and shot her dead in her back through her white dress as she fled. He then shot himself through the heart, while another witness grabbed his pistol and shot him twice more. is passionate crime was a terrible scandal. Felicitas’s beauty was legendary. She stands there, widowed, with a son, in Carrara marble. This eclectic

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Villa desocupación, ‘Village of the unemployed’, 9.

church, with its 1873 German organ, has lovely stained glass. Barracas, where the church stands, was at the time where the rich and noble lived, but it has since declined.

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5 Buenos Aires as the Capital, 1880–1930

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L

una called 1880 Buenos Aires’s ‘foundational year’ as it became a federalized capital and saw General Julio Argentino Roca’s Campaña del Desierto (Desert Campaign) of 1878–9 successfully completed. Some see this campaign as bringing civilization to Argentina by pushing back the nomadic indigenous peoples and their malones, which razed Tandil in 1875 and Azul in 1876, some 200 km south of the city. e campaign liberated some 500,000 sq. km. Roca brought Patagonia into the nation and kept Chilean border claims at bay by overseeing the creation of the Andean frontier and by eliminating the fear of Indian raids and the kidnapping of cautivas. In 1880 Buenos Aires became what it is today by absorbing the villages of Belgrano and Flores, though only in 1994 was Buenos Aires deemed an ‘autonomous’ city. General Julio Argentino Roca (1843–1914) became president twice, from 1880 to 1886 and again in 1898 to 1904. Juan Manuel Blanes’s painting of him on horseback in a clean uniform, unaccompanied by further dignitaries, who were not present in this messy desert campaign, decorates the 100-peso note. Roca boasted that his campaign only led to 1,600 hostile Indians killed or captured, with the rest, some 10,000, surrendering. e leaders were imprisoned on Martín García. In between his two stints as president, he handed the presidency over to his brother-in-law, Juárez Celman. Roca, ‘El Zorro’ (e Fox), was born in Tucumán (that is, not a porteño) and became a general aged 31 and president aged 37. He was, in Carlos Floria and César Belsunce’s history, a practical, conservative caudillo who demanded peace and order. He was an acute observer and had travelled the country on mule, horse and train, unlike his contemporaries who remained

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Map of Buenos aires by Pablo ludwig, 89.

on the island of Buenos Aires. He oversaw the modernization of the conservative state, completing the essential freshwater and sewage works (the Obras Sanitarias), the best train system in Latin America, trams in the city and secular, state education (which forced him to break with the Vatican), so that Buenos Aires began to be seen as the Paris of South America. Under Roca in 1881 Argentina decided on a single currency, the peso de oro. In 1881 Roca built the Hotel de Inmigrantes, where new arrivals could spend a free week. Immigration, with some 49 per cent coming from Italy and 30 per cent from Spain, transformed the city. Moya showed that, between 1857 and 1930, 6,278,341 arrived in the city. Of the 53 million who left Europe between 1820 and 1932, Argentina was the second most popular destination, behind only the usa, with 11.6 per cent, followed by Canada and Brazil. e immigrants who returned to Europe were known as ‘swallows’. e date 4 September is designated Día del Inmigrante (Day of the Immigrant). General Roca, widowed early on with a large family, lived at San Martín 575, with its covered patio and seven bedrooms and bathrooms, each one with a bidet. e house had an escape

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tunnel in case of attack, although Roca walked openly to work through the city with his personal assistant Colonel Gramajo. Later, he scandalized society by taking as his mistress Guillermina, the wife of his schoolfriend Eduardo Wilde and 26 years younger than Roca. After an assassination attempt, Roca left the bullet hole in his carriage as a reminder of his sacrifice for the nation. He certainly dominated his age. Paul Groussac, a critic and the director of the Biblioteca Nacional, found him taciturn, cold and reserved, but a good listener. He remains a controversial figure, and historian Osvaldo Bayer, for example, has called for all statues of him to be pulled down. Sensitive to provincial rancour about Buenos Aires, Roca had wanted Argentina’s second city, Rosario, to become the capital. He coped with a massive rise in Buenos Aires’s demography: between 1853 and 1910, Argentina moved from less than a million inhabitants to 7 million. Buenos Aires was no longer ‘Spanish’ and patriarchal. Gone was the mud, dust and sewer stink. However, poet Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) referred to immigrants as ‘plebs in the hallways’ and antiimmigrant feeling increased in the governing elite, who ran the country in what Luna called the ‘alliance of notables’, with in-fights but no democracy for the masses. By 1917, with the Mexican Revolution and the October Revolution in Russia as models, revolt was in the air. Immigration, an urban phenomenon, led to a new political party, the

Juan Manuel Blanes, Military Occupation of the Río Negro, 879, showing general roca on a horse.

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recently arrived immigrants to the city, c. 900.

Unión Cívica Radical (ucr), founded in 1890 and winning the presidency under Hipólito Yrigoyen (1852–1933) in 1916. He was the first president voted in (by men only) following the universal male suffrage act of 1912, a law promoted by Roque Sáenz Peña, with its obligatory and secret voting for all men over the age of eighteen. e ucr thus represented the new urban working and middle classes. An uprising led by the austere Leandro Alem (1841–1896), backed by some 30,000, took place in the Parque de Artillería (now the Palacio de Justicia on Plaza Lavalle) in 1890. It failed, but left some 300 dead. His statue stands on Avenida Leandro Alem and Maipú. In the revolt, a young, armed Ángel Gallardo witnessed upended trams, drivers and horses in pools of blood and bullets flying everywhere. e uprising forced President Miguel Ángel Juárez Celman (1844–1909), Argentina’s tenth president, to resign, to cries of ‘At last he’s gone, little donkey from Cordoba’. When Vice President Carlos Pellegrini took over, he installed a state of siege and arrested several Radicals, identifiable by their

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boinas blancas (white berries). Leandro Alem (1842–1896) was a rabble-rouser, an ‘incorruptible’ who sought free elections. His suicide in a carriage on his way to the Club El Progreso (a traditional men’s club, the oldest in South America) left Hipólito Yrigoyen, his nephew, in charge. Both men lie in the Recoleta in the Radical Pantheon, a special mausoleum for Radicals in the cemetery. Carlos Pellegrini (1846–1906; son of the French-born engineer and artist Charles Henri), nicknamed the ‘gringo’ (his mother was English), was an intellectual, a joker and a brilliant orator – a key figure behind the scenes. He became interim president in 1890. He had founded the Jockey Club and the Hipódromo Argentino off Palermo Park while in Paris in 1876. In 1899, he became the first Argentine to ride a bike, in the Bois de Boulogne. e Palermo Hipódromo now houses a casino, but its grand 1909 stand for spectators, with restaurant, incarnates Pellegrini’s impact. He was one of the ‘Europeanizers’ or modernistas, embodying the galicismo mental (French mindset) that characterized Buenos Aires. French traveller Jean Yfernet, in 1885, remarked that people dressed as if in Paris and spoke Spanish, but thought in French. is fad for Paris could be seen in the splendour of the Argentine pavilion at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889. Designed by French architect Albert Ballu, next to the Eiffel Tower, it was opened by Pellegrini. is boast of wealth and culture was re-erected in the Plaza San Martín, along with a confitería. It then became the Museo de Bellas Artes, until it was pulled down in 1933. At the other extreme of francophilia, Florencio Escardó, a doctor and writer, mockingly called Buenos Aires the capital of the bidet. Pellegrini founded the Banco de la Nación Argentina in 1891 on top of the demolished Colón opera house; Alejandro Bustillo redesigned the bank in 1937 and it was completed in 1955. is austere, neoclassical building takes up a whole block, with a massive, 36-m-high domed hall. A white marble statue by J. F. Coután (1914) memorializes Pellegrini on the Plazoleta Carlos Pellegrini. e wealth of the country he ran is evident in some of the surviving buildings around this

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small square. e Palacio Ortiz Basualdo on Arroyo, 1060/91, designed by French-born Paul Pater (1879–1966) in 1913, has been preserved from the widening of the Avenida 9 de Julio because, since 1939, it has been the French embassy. It’s a typical four-floored private townhouse, with mansard roofs and dome, where Edward Windsor stayed in 1925. Equally grand is the Mansión Álzaga Unzué, built between 1916 and 1919 and now a Four Seasons hotel, losing its garden to a tower block. Also saved from the pickaxe was the Palacio Pereda (Cerritos 1350), since 1943 the Brazilian embassy. Its French architect Louis Martin was commissioned to copy the Paris Hôtel Jacquemart-André. It was completed in 1939 by architect Julio Dormal. After the first grand Jockey Club on Florida was burned down by Peronist mobs on 15 April 1953, it was rehoused at Alvear 1345 – appropriately on this plazoleta near the statue of its founder. is building, the ex-Palacio Unzué de Casares, was designed by architect Juan Buschiazzo and

hall of the Jockey Club on florida, opened 897 and burned down in 95.

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modelled on Parisian hotels, with mansard roofs. W. H. Koebel called the original Jockey Club of 1897 on Florida ‘the sanctum of the aristocracy’, like a London gentleman’s club, with gym, Turkish bath, library, great fencing hall, onyx staircase, fabulous wine cellar and, for intimate events, a small dining room brought out complete from a French château. e damaged sculpture of Diana by Alexandre Falguière from the Florida site now stands in the entrance of the Alvear site. is latest Jockey Club comprises two mansions joined together, with bars on each floor and rooms for bridge and poker, where women must still be accompanied by a member. ese buildings reflect Pellegrini’s pseudo-aristocratic Argentina. Buenos Aires badly needed a deep-water harbour, so the businessman Eduardo Madero (1833–1894) was commissioned to develop the massive works and dredging. He employed the British engineer John Hawkshaw to draw up the plans. e city’s newest barrio retains his name, Puerto Madero. Dársena Sur, the Southern Dock, was begun in 1887 and completed in 1898. e Puerto Nuevo (New Port) was built in 1925–6 and is now the container harbour. Giant cruise ships dock at Dársena C. Madero’s endless vista of red-brick warehouses were from the 1990s turned into lofts, modern offices and restaurants; some cranes were left and stand there, useless, today. is harbour, with its diques (docks), lies close to the city centre. During the colonial period and into the nineteenth century goods and passengers came off boats in the muddy shallows in horse-drawn carts. In 1872 a long pier was built. Another engineer, Luis A. Huergo (1837–1913), developed the Riachuelo as a deep-water harbour with shipyards (astilleros). He was outbid by Madero’s expensive plan for the city’s harbour. Immigrants disembarked into the new octagonal Hotel de Inmigrantes. e first Hotel de Inmigrantes was made of tin in 1857 and a law passed in 1876 assured immigrants a free five-day stay. e new ‘hotel’ opened in 1911, with dining halls for men and for women (seating 1,000 diners) and, upstairs, twelve huge rooms with room for 250 people in each. e hotel stands three storeys high at Avenida Antártida 1355. According to the sociologist Francis Korn, 526,639 immigrants passed through this hotel

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View of Palacio ortiz Basualdo, now the french embassy.

between 1921 and 1929. e wealth of the port can be gauged by the aduana (customs) building, styled like a Loire château and opened in 1910 on Plaza Justo overlooking diques 2 and 3, as well as by monumental industrial buildings such as the Usina Puerto Nuevo, an electricity generating plant. is facility was built in 1932 on 18 ha of reclaimed land by architects Enrique Derée and Eugenio D’Huicque. Another grand building and power station is the odd, castellated Usina Pedro de Mendoza (now the Usina del Arte, a cultural centre) in La Boca, built by architect Juan Chiogna in 1916. What made Buenos Aires unique in Latin America was the open-door policy for immigration. As noted, immigrants were

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welcomed from the earliest days under Rivadavia and officially in the 1853 constitution written by Alberdi. ere were Scottish colonies, Irish ones, Jewish ones, German ones and Chinese ones, but principally Italians, who created neighbourhoods like La Boca and also spread over the city. e Italians mainly came from the poor south of Italy and brought their dialects, traditions and foods. Italian stonemasons and architects erased the Hispanic Moorish tradition in Buenos Aries with their buildings. eir food became part of the Argentine diet – fresh pasta such as ravioli (and many pasta-making shops) and torta pasqualina (a spinach pie, eaten at Easter in Italy but all year round in Argentina). Potato gnocchi is ritually eaten on the 29th of each month. Even the intonation of Tuscan Italian can be heard in spoken Argentinian. Immigrants created pigeon languages such as cocoliche and underworld slang like lunfardo, entering tango lyrics and being incorporated into porteño Spanish. Between 1850 and 1932 some 6 million foreigners stayed on in Argentina. e boom year was 1889, with 220,000 arrivants. In 1914, a staggering 42.7 per cent of the country’s inhabitants had been born abroad (compare this to 5 per cent in the provincial capital, Jujuy). e city barely coped with these foreign-language speakers in what was alluded to as Babel, crowded into the sausage-shaped conventillos. Many immigrants shared a bed in what was known as a cama caliente

View of the la Boca docks, 890s.

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The hotel de inmigrantes, 885.

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(‘hot bed’, where one slept for twelve hours before letting another sleep in the same warmed bed for the next twelve). A derivation of this new Babel is the national club, beginning with establishments such as the opulent Club Español, founded in 1852 and rehoused in 1911 on Bernardo de Irigoyen, 172/180 (with grand, gilded dome, staircase, elevators and echoes of the Alhambra and Spanish Rococo), and the English Club, founded in 1893, on Avenida 25 de

la Boca, c. 890s.

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Mayo, 586. José C. Moya called the Club Español the city’s most splendid art nouveau structure. You could play billiards or fence and can eat well in its restaurant. e equally grand Circolo Italiano, founded in 1873, moved to a palace designed by Alejandro Christophersen in 1908, and was inaugurated in 1944 on Libertad, 1264, complete with large garden. ere are further immigrant associations: a Club Français, a Club Sueco, a Club Danés, a Club Sirio, a Club Asturiano, a Club Armenio – all at first male only. e Armenians, exiled from Turkey, represented 12 per cent of the city in 1936. Turks themselves formed a ‘barrio de los turcos’ along Reconquista and Córdoba, and turco was applied to any immigrant from the Middle East. e Centro Gallego at Avenida Belgrano 2195 – a hospital, theatre and library – was founded in 1907 and moved to its current site in 1921; because Galicians formed the majority of Spaniards who emigrated to Argentina, gallego is slang for Spaniard. Equally telling for the mushrooming city was the expansion of the railways, from 1880. The earliest, in 1857, was the Ferrocarril del Oeste (west). is station was on the site of the current Colón Opera House on Plaza Lavalle and the line went west to Flores, then a separate village. By 1864 Buenos Aires was linked to Luján, a town some 68 km northwest of the city, famous for its shrine and icon of the Virgen de Luján, Argentina’s patron saint. e first steam engine was called La Porteña. e station for travel west, on Plaza Once (also known as Miserere), is called Estación Once de Septiembre. Built by Belgian architect Doyer in 1896 for a British company, it amalgamates the station with the Bolsa de Cereales (cereal exchange). Of the grand stations, it’s the most dilapidated. On 22 February 2012, an overcrowded suburban train lost its brakes and crashed into the buffers, killing 51 passengers – the worst train accident in the city’s history. e Ferrocarril del Norte, built with British capital, opened its line to Belgrano in 1862 and then on to Tigre on the Paraná delta. e later magnificent Estación Retiro, built on reclaimed land below the Plaza San Martín by the docks, is in reality three stations. The name Retiro (Retreat) alludes to a colonial governor’s Casa de Campo (country house), built in 1696. It was sold to

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ferrocarril del oeste and its la Porteña engine.

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the British South Sea Company, with their slave depot. Now Retiro is just a name. e San Martín station was made of steel and wood in 1886. en came the Belgrano in 1913 and finally the Mitre, built between 1908 and 1915 by British architects Roger Conder and Sydney Follet, its facade inspired by Cardiff town hall. All its pieces, from iron girders to tiles, came from Britain. An imposing entrance for carriages, huge, vaulted ticket area and marble-pillared and chandeliered restaurant and confitería make it the cathedral of stations.

retiro station and the Torre de los ingleses, 90s.

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Torre de los ingleses, or Torre Monumental today, on Plaza fuerza aérea.

Opposite Mitre station is the Torre de los Ingleses, a smaller version of Big Ben, on the Plaza Fuerza Aérea Argentina. After the Malvinas/Falklands war, its name changed to the Torre Monumental de Retiro. It opened in 1916 as a gift from the British community for the 1910 centenary of the May revolution. e tower, designed by Ambrose Poynter, is 59 m high, with a glass elevator up to a circular mirador, and it is covered in symbols of the uk, from a Tudor rose and an Irish shamrock to a Welsh Dragon and the Empire’s roaring lion. Its mahoganyencased clock is the most accurate public clock in the city. e area around Retiro station is busy, noisy and polluted. Nearby is Villa Miseria no. 31 and the modern bus terminal (for micros: large, comfy buses to all parts of Argentina). e third main station is the monumental Ferrocarril del Sud (south), which opened on Plaza Constitución in 1864. Between 1885 and 1932, English engineers Parr, Strong & Parr and others added to it. e 39-m-high hall, with concrete vaults, is based on Roman thermal baths. Like the Retiro station, it’s an epicentre of Latin American trade and barter.

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ese three city stations are tied to the port, in historian James Scobie’s words. ere is a Museo Ferroviario for trainspotting nostalgics on Avenida Libertador, 405. e city’s few curved, narrow streets are old railway sidings, like Caminito in La Boca and Discépolo. The tram (tranvía) has left its mark in many city streets with the iron rails peeping through asphalt and cobblestones. Trams made a comeback in Puerto Madero in 2007, with 2.5 km of track linking Retiro with Barracas along the docks. The first trams from 1864 were horse-drawn; by 1897 they were electrified and in a way created the suburbs as they sped out of the city at 15 km/h. By 1905 there were 65 km of tramlines. e tram owners were part English, running the Anglo-Argentine and the Lacroze tram companies. In 1925 The Times claimed that the Buenos Aires tram system was ‘remarkable’ and far larger than London’s, but by 1962 trams were abandoned for colectivos. President Roca appointed Torcuato de Alvear (1822–1890) as Buenos Aires’s first mayor, or intendente. Torcuato was the millionaire son of independence general Carlos María de Alvear, director of the Provincias Unidas from 1815 to 1816.

Constitución station.

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The general’s equestrian statue in Recoleta (Libertador and Alvear) by Antoine Bourdelle, Rodin’s assistant, was erected in 1926 on an ochre granite pedestal designed by Alejandro Bustillo. Torcuato was a modernizer who knocked down colonial Buenos Aires, in what has been called the city’s third foundation. He demolished the Recova arches across the Plaza de Mayo and part of the cabildo. He reacted against the plazas secas (dry plazas lacking trees) and appointed Carlos ays to landscape them with trees, insisting that the Plaza de Mayo have palm trees (soon ripped out, though the Casa Rosada’s one remains) rather than the stunted paraíso trees (Chinaberries imported by Sarmiento). He created the Avenida de Mayo as a ‘boulevard’ along Baron Haussmann lines (approved in 1884, it was inaugurated in 1894) and planned the new Colón opera house. Torcuato also created Avenida Quintana, named after the president who succeeded Roca in 1904 – now one of the smartest streets in the city with tall, expensive flats, leading to the Recoleta cemetery. Manuel J. Quintana (1835–1906) survived an anarchist’s assassination attempt in 1905 when the pistol locked, but died in office. e parallel street, Avenida Alvear, named after this intendente, has preserved some of the city’s mansions and reeks of Argentine grandeur. An imposing residence with a dome is (since 1949) the Vatican’s Nunciatura Apostolica, once the Palacio Fernández de Anchorena, completed in 1909, with a garden falling down the bank to Posadas street. Next door at Alvear 1661 is the Palacio Duhau, named after its first owner (not to be mistaken for the house next door), built by a minister under President Augustín Pedro Justo (r. 1932–8) in 1934 and designed by French-born architect León Dourge (1890–1969), with boiserie panelling bought from a seventeenth-century Normandy château; in 2006 it became a Park Hyatt hotel. Next to it, at Alvear 1683, is the spooky Palacio Duhau (or Residencia Maguire, after Duhau’s son-in-law, or Palacio Hume, after its first Scottish builder), built in 1893, easily identifiable by the magnolia shading the drive behind large iron railings. is fussy Victorian Gothic mansion of stone and brick, with tiles imported from Scotland,

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completes a trio of conservative monuments to wealth with eclectic European echoes. Christopher Isherwood found these buildings ponderous in 1947, adding that they were untroubled by anxiety and bad conscience. Finally, the Alvear Palace Hotel at Alvear 1891 was completed in 1928 in French academic style, with a roof garden and 280 rooms. Intendente Torcuato’s bust in Carrara marble, by German sculptor S. Lauer, was inaugurated in 1900 and stands on a plaza named after him where Avenidas Pueyrredón and Libertador meet. He is buried in the Recoleta, dying before he saw his new city centre. A plaque on the corner of avenidas Callao and Quintana commemorates the assassination in 1909 of the chief of police, Colonel Ramón Falcón, and his young secretary by an anarchist – an event that shocked the city. e austere Falcón had put down a workers’ anarchist demonstration on Plaza Lorea, leaving three dead. ere’s an allegorical monument to him in white marble, sculpted by Alberto Lagos in 1918, on Plaza Ramón Cárcano. Lagos (1885–1960) had his studio on Avenida Córdoba, his library famous for cookbooks. Today, the Russianborn anarchist Simón Radowitzky, who threw the bomb into Falcón’s carriage, is better known. He failed to shoot himself, but was too young for the death penalty. He was first imprisoned in the now-demolished Penitenciaría Nacional, escaped,

Colonel ramón falcón’s plaque, av. Callao and av. Quintana.

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was recaptured and sent down to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, escaped and was caught again. In 1930, after nineteen years’ imprisonment, often in solitary confinement and with little to read, President Hipólito Yrigoyen – surprisingly – pardoned him. Expelled from Argentina, he fought in the Spanish Civil War and died in Mexico in 1956; Bruce Chatwin retold his story in his travelogue In Patagonia (1977). Another notable anarchist was Italian-born Severino di Giovanni, deported by Mussolini in 1923 after bombing the Italian Consulate. In 1930 he was illegally shot by firing squad (since 1921 there had been no death penalty) in the patio of the Penitenciaría under dictator José Félix Uriburu (1868–1932), shouting ‘Viva la anarquía! ’ (‘Long live anarchy!’). You can see his photo in the Museo Penitenciario Argentino, once the Buen Pastor prison. Foreigners were associated with trouble. In 1902 a Residency law was passed, allowing unwanted foreigners (usually anarchists) to be expelled, but despite this, in the census of 1909 only 607,513 of the city’s 1,231,698 were Argentine-born. Irreconcilable with the workers’ poverty was the urban palace built by Chilean diplomat Matías Errázuriz and his wife Josefina de Alvear, who was related to the independence general, Carlos María de Alvear, Mayor Torcuato de Alvear and President Marcelo T. de Alvear. In 1911 they commissioned French architect René Sergent to build them a four-floored grand palais. It was completed in 1918, with a mansard roof and four Corinthian columns, and packed with antiques and art – from El Greco and Cranach to Manet and Rodin. It has a huge Renaissance hall with a stucco ceiling that fakes oak and grand marble staircases, with everything imported from Europe – the epitome of French-based criollo taste. In 1922 there was a banquet for 500 guests; Anna Pavlova once danced there and ill-fated Spanish writer Federico García Lorca recited his poems. In 1937 it became the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo and stands on Avenida Libertador, 1902. Surrounded by jacaranda trees, its gatehouse is now a bar called Croque Madame. Another building epitomizing this wealthy period is El Palacio de Aguas Corrientes (Palace of Running Water),

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planned by a Swedish engineer in 1877 and completed by Norwegian architect Olaf Boye in 1894. is baroque extravaganza is best viewed from Avenida Córdoba, with its public entrance at Riobamba 752, surrounded by iron rails and a narrow garden with palm trees. Most striking are its fake, eclectic fronts and sides (90 by 90 m), concealing the city’s water-pumping station, with gigantic tanks holding 72 million litres. e station pumped water until 1978. As the museo inside explains, 300,000 glazed terracotta tiles were made by Royal Doulton in England and shipped out; its green roof tiles came from Sedan in France. Like a palace, it has a mansard roof and escutcheons representing the fourteen Argentine provinces. It is so visually deceptive that you would never guess its actual use. Such duplicity suggests the city’s immense wealth, as nothing in the facade is functional. ere’s a second Palacio de Aguas Argentinas in Villa Devoto, completed in 1917 in French neo-Renaissance style on Avenida Francisco de Berrio, with twelve huge and empty cisterns on one of the city’s highest points (38 m) – which doesn’t sound that high, but Buenos Aires is built on the flat pampas. Villa Devoto, a barrio since 1889, is best known for its prison, a whole city block built in 1923 for 1,694 prisoners. Angel Prignano has outlined how the city dealt with its drinking water, sewers and drains. e Irish engineer John Coghlan (1824–1890) drew up the earliest plans and a city barrio and station are named after him. e English civil engineer John Bateman (1810–1889) wrote a report in 1871 incorporating Coghlan’s views without travelling out to the city (later, in 1874, Sarmiento invited him to Buenos Aires). He solved the sewer and drinking-water problems and finally dispelled the city’s cloacal stench. A pumping house built in La Recoleta in 1895, with two huge chimneys, drew water from the Paraná until 1928. en architect Alejandro Bustillo redesigned the neoclassical Recoleta pumping house as a museum. It opened in 1933 as the current Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. e sewers were dug in from 1912, with faecal waters tunnelled out to Berazategui, a suburb, and back into the Paraná. e current pumping station, the Planta

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Potabilizadora General San Martín, built over 23 ha in 1928, is in Palermo. By 1949 the underground water network was complete. Its astonishing symbol is the Palace of Running Water. Over these years of Radical rule (1916–30), the city developed its metro, in service from 1930 and the first in South America. e lines radiated out from the Obelisco/Avenida 9 de Julio like a fan, with lines E, A (the first in 1913 from Plaza de Mayo to Plaza Miserere), B and D going north and C running east– west, with a new line, H, also running east–west. e metro system is still expanding. Known as the subte (subterráneo), it’s slow but cheap. e carriages can be packed, but this does not deter ambulant sellers from dropping products on laps or musicians from busking. Subtes are genuinely democratic, echoing Hipólito Irigoyen’s populism. As equally classless as the subte were the buses, known as colectivos, first horse-drawn, then fuelrun (slangily known as bondis). e number 60 was the earliest, running from 1930 and still the best as it rattles out to Tigre. Colectivo designs are constantly changing, so the old colourful ‘dragons’ can only be seen in the outskirts. Methods of payment also change, but colectivos criss-cross the city, belching their fumes, with highly skilled drivers. ey stand for porteño improvisation as they dodge in and out of the crazy traffic. Another potent building of this period was the Palacio del Congreso, where the elected deputies and senators sit, on Hipólito Yrigoyen, 1835. It was designed by Vittorio Meano, replaced after his murder by Belgian architect Jules Dormal. It links with the Casa Rosada along the new Avenida de Mayo. Visually, it echoes Washington’s Capitol or Berlin’s Reichstag, and its facade has 24 grey, granite columns. Solemn and imposing, its green dome is visible for miles around. It opened in 1906. e year 1910 put an end to Buenos Aires as a colonial town. e political turmoil of the years 1902 to 1910 coincided with the rise of the Radical party, the Unión Cívica Radical, as serious opponents to the conservatives in power. ey refused to play the elite’s election game and sought revolution, along with elements of the army. ey stood for public morality, the constitution and the free vote. e Radicals were known as

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Palacio del Congreso nacional, inaugurated 906.

the ‘intransigents’ (suggesting a kind of moral integrity) for this reason. It was in 1912 that immigration peaked at 379,117 and in 1914 reached 49.36 per cent of the city population. is staggering figure for foreign-born over natives made Buenos Aires a laboratory for future cities. Immigrants created their own culture of tango, brothels (legalized in 1875) and underworld characters like the guapo, the malevolo and the guarango (these types represent low-life thugs, petty criminals and social upstarts), who clashed with the natives – the criollos – in the city. e Radicals represented these immigrant communities. e year 1910 was officially celebrated as the centenary of independence, though few heads of state turned up (England was mourning the death of Edward vii). ere was a grand procession down the Avenida de Mayo and an Italian pilot, Bartolomé Cattaneo, became the first to fly over the city in a small Blériot, watched by the crowds. A new circular park called Parque Centenario was created to Carlos ays’s design. Around it grew grand official buildings like the eclectic Museo de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia, erected between

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1925 and 1940 on Avenida Angel Gallardo, 470. It had changed its name and been housed in different buildings about the city, being run by the scientist Florentino Ameghino (1854–1911) from 1902 until he died and then by Angel Gallardo, up to 1916. Angel’s grandson José María Gallardo became a later director. Also round the Parque Centenario are La Escuela Uriburu (a grand secondary school) and the Instituto Pasteur, founded in 1927 and dealing with diseases transmitted by animals, though the last case of rabies in the city was in 1981. For the 1910 celebration, the French community donated the monument on Plaza Francia, designed by Emile Peynet in Carrara marble and ready on time. e English donated, as noted, the Torre de los Ingleses and the Spaniards the ornate Monumento de los Españoles, the first stone laid in 1910 by the Infanta Isabel de Borbón (aunt to Alfonso xiii), the main guest for the centenary, though not completed until 1927, on a roundabout in Palermo. e Catalan sculptor Agustín Querol created the Monumento de los Españoles, working in white Carrara marble and bronze. e Swiss donated a monument in bronze and granite made by Paul Amlehn and shipped out in 1914. It includes two naked women kissing on a globe and, higher up, a hunter on a horse with a bow. It stands on Avenida Dorrego in Palermo Park. President Sáenz Peña’s 1912 electoral reforms changed Buenos Aires. e man who fought for free elections (for men) was Hipólito Yrigoyen, president 1916–22 and again 1930–32 and nominated by the critic Ezequiel Martínez Estrada as the city’s real hero. Yrigoyen voiced the new immigrants’ desires and attacked the oligarchy. is strange, tall, ascetic man with perfect teeth was a paternalist caudillo and son of an illiterate Basque stable boy. His maternal grandfather had been executed as a member of Rosas’s Mazorca. Yrigoyen never married (but fathered ten children). He instigated the eight-hour working day and, as a pacifist, kept Argentina neutral during the First World War. He had refused to be mayor of Buenos Aires and instead conspired to gain greater power. In 1890 he led the ‘Revolución del Parque’, as previously noted, in the Parque de Artillería, which led to President Juárez Celman’s resignation,

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an economic collapse and Argentina defaulting on its debt. en, between 1891 and 1904, Yrigoyen retired from public life and made a fortune farming. A poor talker, and mute in public, Yrigoyen followed the German philosopher Karl Krause’s (1781–1832) neo-Kantian philosophy and also donated his salary from teaching Argentine history (and later his presidential salary) to a children’s hospital. In 1905 he was involved in yet another coup that failed. Aged 64 when first elected president and 76 the second time, Yrigoyen was nicknamed ‘El Viejo’ (Old Man), as well as ‘Peludo’ (Armadillo in his Hole). He didn’t hesitate to put down an anarchist uprising in 1919 but in 1929, following the Great Crash, he was unable to deal with debt and the economy. e coup that toppled him ensured a military participation in government for the next 50 years. Yrigoyen was arrested and locked up on Martín García island for fifteen months – and died there. His embalmed corpse lies in the Recoleta. e journalist Jorge Lanata summarized his importance as bringing the working class into politics and fighting for Latin American autonomy and national emancipation. He lived alone in a modest house on Brasil and walked to work when president. When he stepped down in 1922, this simple, laconic man walked home. When he was toppled from power in 1930 while hiding in the city of La Plata, a crowd stormed the Casa Rosada shouting ‘Death to the Peludo’ and threw his marble effigy from a balcony (a certain Colonel Perón, down on the Plaza de Mayo, kept a shard as a souvenir). ey then ransacked his home, burning his furniture in a bonfire. White noted how Yrigoyen was both fanatically loved and bitterly hated – a personality cult centred on him, with pictures up all over the city. A black mark for Yrigoyen was the semana trágica – a truly tragic week in January 1919 during which some 700 metalworkers, anarchists and trade unionists were killed by the police and right-wing thugs from La Liga Patriótica (e Patriotic League), organized from the imposing Círculo Naval, a Rococo Italian navy officers’ club on the corner of Córdoba and Florida and one of the notable architectural sites of the city. Designed by French/Swiss architects Gaston Mallet and Jacques Dunant

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in 1914, it’s not viewable by the public, except for its ornate bronze doorway sculpted by Luis Tiberti. e semana trágica saw metallurgical workers from the Vasena factory in Nueva Pompeya, a working-class city district, go on strike to reduce their working day from eleven to eight hours and have Sundays off. Fears of revolution led to police hiding in the Chacarita cemetery and shooting dead up to 50 mourners. is act has also been called a pogrom, as Jewish people in the Once, a barrio, were picked on and some 70 murdered, with synagogues and libraries burned down. Between his two presidencies, Yrigoyen appointed Radical Marcelo T. de Alvear (1868–1943) as his successor. Marcelo T. (a street is named after him) was the black sheep of the wealthy Alvear family and son of Torcuato, the first mayor of the city. When president, from 1922 to 1928, Marcelo T. reverted to his conservative background, antagonizing his mentor Yrigoyen and surrounding himself with later coup generals like Uriburu and Justo. He was a dandy, had a mansion in Paris and in 1901, the butt of upper-class mockery, married the Portuguese soprano Regina Pacini, whom he first spotted singing opera. He spent eight years wooing her and his ‘tempestuous affair’ was always in the news. A café on Avenida Santa Fe, 772, is named Torcuato & Regina and the Teatro Regina in the fine art deco Casa del Teatro on Avenida Santa Fe, 1235, designed by architect Virosoro, has a Museo Regina Pacini de Alvear. Regina’s husband Marcelo T., nicknamed ‘El Pelado’ (e Bald One) for losing his hair early, became president of the Jockey Club. He welcomed the Prince of Wales (later Edward viii and then Duke of Windsor) to Buenos Aires in 1925. e prince stayed at the Basualdo mansion (now the French embassy) and wrote home to his mother that he was ‘absolutely mobbed’. English influence was at its height – from railways, five o’clock tea, Savile Row suits and Harrods to pedigree Herefords and Romney Marsh sheep. For example, Hereford breeders had their own club on Manuel Obarrio, 2948. e journalist Andrew Graham-Yooll reckoned that there was a colony of 30–40,000 Anglos (compared with some 1,000 North Americans). ey mostly lived in Hurlingham, a suburb

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outside Buenos Aires, and played polo from the 1850s onwards (brought over from India’s Calcutta Polo Club), so that Argentina today exports polo players around the world. Some 67 per cent of all foreign investment was British. e daily Buenos Aires Herald, founded in 1876, represents this ‘Anglo’ factor. e neo-Graecian, six-columned Catedral Anglicana, designed by Richard Adams in 1831 and funded from England, stands on 25 de Mayo, 276. ere’s also a British cemetery off the Chacarita. Marcelo T. Alvear would stroll from the Casa Rosada to the Café Tortoni on the Avenida de Mayo, like any other welldressed porteño, and chat with poets there. After Yrigoyen’s fall, he too was accused of plotting and was arrested in 1932. He spent four months in prison on Martín García. When he died in 1943, just before the coup, his coffin was carried by a huge crowd to the Recoleta in what John W. White, a witness, called the greatest popular demonstration in favour of democracy ever seen in Buenos Aires. During Alvear’s presidency, the economy boomed, as did immigration. Between 1924 and 1929, 2 million more reached Argentina. e arts flourished, encouraged by Alvear’s love of opera and theatre. An avant-garde magazine named after the gaucho hero, Martín Fierro, with illustrations, satirical jibes and much poetry, from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, set the tone. It ran from 1924 to 1927 and was edited by Evar Méndez, Alvear’s private secretary. Its head offices were on Florida, and it vied as an elitist enterprise with a more politicized group named after the avenue where they met and had their printing press – Avenida Boedo, famous also as a tango avenue. e mainly male participants in these street-associated groups were friends. Borges felt that he really belonged to Boedo as he was an Yrigoyenista and wrote about working-class life in Palermo. Florida, the first pedestrianized street in the city, was also a shopping Mecca, with Harrods (and its famous tearoom) opening in 1914 (its bricks, cement, ironwork and wood all from Britain), and Gath & Chaves, a department store founded in 1883.

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Florida’s bookshops and cafés were opulent, like the Ateneo and the Richmond (now closed). In 1915 a fourteen-floor building, some 87 m high, the city’s first skyscraper, epitomizes this boom, known by its vaulted public passageway and shops called Galería Güemes. It is lavishly art nouveau, with countless marble carvings and stained-glass windows designed by the Italian Francesco Gianotti, who also designed the famous but now abandoned Confitería del Molino, still standing with its windmill next to the Palacio del Congreso. Restored, the Güemes gallery links the streets San Martín and Florida and has a mirador at the top. e Boston City bar inside was famous as a men-only bar. e writer Álvaro Abós cites Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French writer and pilot, who rented a flat in this gallery in 1929, as hating Buenos Aires for being a place where you couldn’t walk, where everybody was lugubrious and sad. It lacked perspectives. He called the city a badly cooked cake. In 1929 architect Le Corbusier visited Buenos Aires and found the city the most inhuman he’d known, a place that ‘martyrized your heart’. He blamed this asphyxiation on the lack of green spaces, complaining that you couldn’t see the sky and that the sea had been conjured away. Le Corbusier famously sketched the plan of a modern home for Victoria Ocampo (finally built by Bustillo on Elizalde 2831, see p. 116) on a paper napkin and built her Mar del Plata summer home (burned down by Peronists in 1973). Another candidate for a building representing the Alvear years is a massive, eclectic, French block of luxury flats known as the Palacio Estrugamou on Juncal and Esmeralda, named after Alejandro Estrugamou and designed by Eduardo Sauze and Auguste Huguier between 1924 and 1929. It takes up a whole block on the rising bank. Every element is luxurious: its inner courtyard, huge iron doors and a copy of the Victory of Samothrace statue in its entrance. An equally huge project was the Palacio de los Patos at Ugarteche 3050, dating from 1929 and in French academic style by architects Henri Azière and Julio Senillosa (Azière designed it in Paris and Senillosa built it). No wonder that in 1928 the Prince of Wales wrote home that the ‘wealth in b.a. is amazing’.

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Palacio estrugamou, on Juncal.

e year 1925 saw the month-long stay of Albert Einstein, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1921. He met President Alvear and Leopoldo Lugones, gave talks and stayed in a palacete (small palace) at Villanueva 1400, now the Australian embassy, with a plaque commemorating his visit. Einstein hated the long boat journey out and summarized Buenos Aires as ‘comfortable, luxurious and superficial’. All cities have their seamy side, and Buenos Aires had the white slave trade. Women were kidnapped or bribed, often from poor Russian Jewish villages; collectively known as rusas,

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ViCToriA oCAmPo Buenos Aires saw the launching of Victoria Ocampo’s cosmopolitan journal Sur, which ran from 1931 to 1971. A plaque denotes its offices on Viamonte, 494. Victoria Ocampo was from the wealthy land-owning class, but used her looks, intelligence and money to congregate a group of writers that included Jorge Luis Borges. He contributed to the magazine from its first issue with foreigners invited to Buenos Aires like Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Tagore and many others. That a woman ran this magazine with such flair was unprecedented in Argentina. She was brave and political and was imprisoned by Perón in 1953, aged 63, in the Buen Pastor jail for three weeks. She published diaries and funded Roger Caillois (stuck in Buenos Aires during the war), who had been her lover. Her Modernist, rationalist townhouse in Barrio Parque is at Rufino de elizalde 2831. Since 2003 it has been the Casa de la Cultura, associated with the government-run cultural organization Fondo Nacional de las Artes, and can be visited. Ocampo’s grand out-of-town house, Villa Victoria in San isidro, is now run by UNeSCO, but can be visited on weekends, and another home in Mar del Plata was burned down by Peronists. A lake in Palermo Park is named after her, but she has been too notorious a figure to have acquired any other public memorials. One illustrious visitor she published was the Granada-born poet Federico García Lorca. He landed by boat in 1933 and stayed for five months in the sombre Hotel Castelar on the Avenida de Mayo, 1152, designed by Mario Palanti. His room (704), which has been left as it was, complete with his writing table, is a small, stark museum. Lorca gave lectures and a radio talk with Pablo Neruda broadcast from the Plaza Hotel on the Plaza San Martín, and he met everybody. His Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1928), surely the most famous book of poems in Spanish, was published by Ocampo. Victoria ocampo (890–979).

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the women were given French names and forced to prostitute themselves to the predominantly male immigrants in brothels in La Boca (the origin of tango as well). A French investigative journalist, Albert Londres (1884–1932), revealed this trade in prostitutes to the world with e Road to Buenos Aires (1928). Londres drowned when his ship, with 300 prostitutes, sank in the Atlantic. unesco took up the women’s plight and the government banned the trade in 1930, arresting 142 pimps. Zwi Migdal, a secret organization, stood out among other pimping concerns; they camouflaged their business as false rabbis meeting in a fake synagogue on Avenida Córdoba, 3280. These pimps controlled 30,000 prostitutes – ‘penny-in-theslot machines’, noted Londres. Buenos Aires became tainted with this trade, this ‘market-place of whores’, as Lugones wrote. Korn showed that 1925 was the year with the most legal brothels, 957 in total.

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6 The infamous decade, 1930–43

T

he ‘Década infame’, in fact lasting more than a decade, introduced the military coups that cursed Buenos Aires on and off until Raúl Alfonsín’s election as president in 1983. e Argentine military mimicked European nationalistic dictatorships and imposed this amalgam of right-wing ideologies on Argentina. Obviously, the Great Depression affected city life and there were huge shanty towns of the unemployed, the first being Villa Esperanza 1932, near the Puerto Nuevo. e military sympathy for fascism meant that only in March 1945, with the war over, did neutral Argentina declare war on Germany and Japan, in order to join the United Nations. General José F. Uriburu’s (not to be confused with earlier president José Evaristo Uriburu, 1895–8) almost bloodless toppling of the ageing Yrigoyen in 1930 inaugurated seventeen months of fascist rule, followed by ten years of fraudulent elections banning the Radicals, until the next coup of 1943. e ideologue behind military intervention to save the country’s soul was poet Leopoldo Lugones, once a socialist, whose 1924 blast, titled ‘La hora de la espada’ (Time for the Sword) and given as a speech in Lima, dared the military to take over. Far worse was his son Leopoldo Lugones Jr, inventor of the torture instrument la picana eléctrica (electric cattle prod). He was evoked by the American Ray Joseph as ‘repulsive’, an Argentine Himmler, under Uriburu’s government and into the 1930s and ’40s. is picana, adapted from the cattle prod, as Horacio Verbitsky, a contemporary journalist, showed, was used by the military in their dirty war in the 1970s. Political parties were banned, the Saénz Peña law of universal suffrage repealed and the oppositional journal Crítica closed. Dictatorship,

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.

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leopoldo lugones.

with its cult of the leader, seemed the best solution. General Uriburu was proclaimed by a crowd of over 100,000 on the Plaza de Mayo, the city’s public space for celebrations. But he was a Mass-going Catholic, horrified by swear words. Out of his depth, he convened elections in 1932 and General Agustín Justo won, lifting the state of siege of the previous two years. Uriburu took off to Paris and died there in 1932. Justo yearned to prolong Mitre and Roca’s earlier presidencies and attract foreign capital. He oversaw the fawning Roca–Runciman pact (Julio Roca was General Roca’s son, and vice president) about exporting beef to Britain and developed the state’s road building programme. But he remained unpopular and was whistled whenever he appeared in public. Compared to Justo, deposed Yrigoyen remained popular. His death cortège in 1933 was followed by the masses, aware that he had defended the common interests of the middle classes and the powerless. e Spanish Civil War exploded in Buenos Aires in 1936 with news of Federico García Lorca’s murder, dividing an already

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divided country, with fistfights between supporters of the Republicans and defenders of Franco’s coup along the Avenida de Mayo. Félix Luna reminded us how ‘Spanish’ the city was in its food, popular music and theatre at that time; far more than today. ere were no ‘neutrals’ concerning Spain’s fate. Republican exiles revived the publishing and university worlds, with publishers Losada, Emecé and Sudamericana in the fore. In 1936 a pen conference held in Buenos Aires’s Concejo Deliberante (now the Palacio de la Legislatura, a sriking 1931 building with a clock tower, once Perón’s ministry of labour and today houses the city’s administration), chaired by Carlos Ibarguren, with writers Marinetti, Stefan Zweig, Alfonso Reyes and others, echoed the political divide. In 1938 Justo was replaced by Roberto Ortiz a day before Lugones killed himself on an island in the Tigre (he was writing a biography of Roca). Diabetic blindness led to Ortiz’s replacement in 1942 by Ramón Castillo until the coup of 4 June 1943. e year 1943 was another one of deep crisis, with three military coups. General Ramírez became president; known as ‘Palito’ (little stick), he was dour and leather-faced, in Joseph’s words. Life in Buenos Aires during the 1940s was one of erratic censorship; even Time magazine was banned, books were burned and anti-Semitic proclamations were led by the popular novelist Hugo Wast (nom-de-plume of Gustavo Martínez Zuviría) as education minister, author of the most vicious anti-Jewish tracts ever published in the Americas (according to Joseph). Universities were closed and rumours ruled. ere was even a blackout trial in case the city was bombed. For the next 40-odd years, the military saw themselves as the saviours of the nation, defending Christian values against corrupt civilian practices and Revolutionary communism. e 1930s saw the rise of the cinema. Lavalle became the crowded cinema street until multiplex cinemas arrived. e Monumental, designed by Claudio Caveri (1928–2011) and called the ‘cathedral’ of cinemas, was on Lavalle, 774. Alberto Prebisch (1899–1970), designer of the Obelisco, created the rationalist masterpiece of the Gran Rex in 1937, with its huge glass front and simple, wide staircase, on

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gALerÍAs PACÍFiCo

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The Galerías Pacífico, with grand entrances on Florida, Viamonte, Córdoba and San Martín, a whole city block, is now an impressive shopping mall. it was planned in 1889 to beT the home of a branch of Le Bon Marché, but h e i n fa M o u s d e C a d e ,  9  0–   that failed. in 1908 it became the head office for the railway company Ferrocarril de Buenos Aires al Pacífico, hence its name, and in 1946 was redesigned by architects José Aslan and Héctor ezcurra as another store, with a vast concrete dome and murals. The murals, painted by Lino enea Spilimbergo, Antonio Berni, Manuel Colmeiro, Demetrio Urruchúa and Juan Carlos Castagnino, were restored in 1990, to become the focal point of the mall of today. you stand downstairs by a fountain in the patio de comida (food court) and look up at the arching murals. For example, Lino Spilimbergo, artist of the New Realism of the 1940s, has painted naked torsos with rippling muscles representing fisheries, navigation and mining as underpinning the new society. The four arms of the building that stretch out connect to the four streets with huge entrances, like Milan’s Vittorio emmanuele ii. The interior is taken up with smart shops and stalls. One corner of this block, on Viamonte and San Martin, is the Centro Cultural Borges, with connecting halls where changing exhibitions of contemporary art are displayed; upstairs is its espacio Borges, where you can get an outline of the writer’s life and work.

art meets consumerism at galerías Pacífico.

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Avenida Corrientes, 857. e art deco, marble-covered Opera (opposite, on Corrientes), was designed by Belgian-born architect Alberto Bourdon (1881–1965) the same year, with air-conditioning and a nursery for babies. When Corrientes was widened, the Gran Teatro Opera was demolished, but its name was kept for the cinema. However, Lavalle is today more a street for cinema historians. e Ambassador remains as a plaque; the Select is now a chemist; the Sarmiento, a bingo joint. Over half the 300 cinemas built in the city between 1896 and 2010 have vanished. However, the Cosmos, on Corrientes, 2046, reopened in 2010 to show independent films in a rundown art deco building designed by Bourdon in 1929. e Gran Splendid on Santa Fe has become the city’s most astonishing bookshop, with a café where the screen was. e Argentine film business, since its first film in 1897, continues to win prizes and cinema-going competes with the latest technologies. Before the cinema, of course, came theatre. eatre in the colonies was religious, autos sacramentales (allegorical dramatizations of the mystery of the Eucharist) or farce, but emerged after Argentine independence when the Podestá brothers began showing their adaption of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s doomed, violent gaucho novel Juan Moreira from 1884. ere’s a monument to José Podestá, dressed as a gaucho, by Luis Perlotti on Córdoba and Libertad. What could be called the national theatre is the Teatro Nacional Cervantes at Córdoba 1125, imitating the baroque façade of the Rectory of Alcalá de Henares University, designed by Fernando Aranda and Emilio Repetto, with all the material brought from Spain on Alfonso xii’s orders. Established by Spanish actors María Guerrero and Fernando Díaz de Mendoza, it opened in 1921 with Lope de Vega’s La dama boba (e Stupid Lady). But by 1926 it had gone bankrupt, so President Alvear nationalized it in 1931. e horseshoe-shaped theatre seats 1,050. Badly burned by fire in 1961, it was restored by Mario Álvarez (1913–2011). For a long time it only showed Spanish farces called zarzuelas (a term for sung and spoken popular theatre), as did the Teatro Avenida at Avenida de Mayo 1212, opening in 1908. Also striking is the ornate, Spanish-facaded Teatro Margarita Xirgú

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T h e i n fa M o u s d e C a d e , 90–

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aerial view taken in 97 of avenida 9 de Julio and the recently constructed obelisco. 

at Chacabuco 863/75, in the Casal de Catalunya, remodelled in 1929. Many of the theatres on Avenida Corrientes, the ‘avenida de los teatros’, are for tango, musicals or song-anddance shows. One early theatre is the Teatro Maipú, founded in 1922 on Esmeralda, 443.Teatro independiente thrives in the city on a shoestring. Important are: the Teatro San Martín, Corrientes 1530, opened in 1960, designed by Mario Álvarez as a modernist building of thirteen floors with three stages, which also shows art and cinema; the Teatro Payró on San Martín, 766; and Andamio 90, on Paraná, 660, where shows first started in 1983. Some plays are once a week; most start late. e symbolic monument of the 1930s was the Obelisco constructed in 1936 on Avenida 9 de Julio, which slices across Buenos Aires from east to west, at the intersection with

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Corrientes. The tall, hollow obelisk (67.5 m high), with a ladder inside, was modelled on the Egyptian original on Paris’ Place de la Concorde. It commemorated the 400th anniversary of the founding of the city (1536) as well as the first raising of the national flag in 1812 and the date 1880, when Buenos Aires became the capital. is memory stick is a crucial city magnet and target of phallic jokes that attracts demonstrations and celebrations. Plácido Domingo once sang there. Underneath it are stalls and a subte station. Designed by Alberto Prebisch, who had studied under Le Corbusier in Paris, it was constructed in 31 days by 157 workers. Horacio Coppola (1906– 2013) filmed this feat in his classic Así nació el Obelisco (How the Obelisk was Born, 1936). It was erected as the narrow Calle Corrientes was widened to become Avenida Corrientes. e local church of San Nicolás de Bari, founded in 1729, which gave the street its earlier name according to Marechal, was knocked down in 1931. Here, the Argentine flag was first raised. e barrio, though, is still called San Nicolás and the church was rebuilt in 1935 at Avenida Santa Fe 1352 with its original bells and baptismal font (Mariano Moreno and Mitre were both baptized in it).

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7 Perón, evita, Peronism and Anti-Peronism, 1943–89

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M

odern Buenos Aires has been dominated by Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Evita (María Eva Duarte). In 1943 few knew about them; soon, both were world-famous. Peronism is hard to pin down, except that it altered over its years in power and its suppression by subsequent military dictators. As a social movement it incorporated the new city migrants from the countryside, urban workers from areas like Avellaneda, Nueva Chicago or Nueva Pompeya, campesinos (country workers) and the marginalized. Nicknamed the descamisados (shirtless ones) or cabezas negras (black heads), referring to their poverty and racial origins, some 83,000 arrived in the city in 1936; in 1947, 90,000. Internal migrants overtook European immigration. Perón was impressed by Mussolini’s fascism when posted as military attaché in Rome from 1939 to 1941. He profited from fleeing Nazis settling in Argentina, including Adolf Eichmann, kidnapped off a street in San Fernando, greater Buenos Aires in 1961 by Mossad (Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations), and not forgetting Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke, Josef Schwammberger and thousands more, studied by journalist Uki Goñi. But Perón closely followed General Franco’s ruthless fascism. Evita visited a Spain ignored by the post-war Marshall Plan in 1947, offering aid, and Perón would exile himself in Madrid. Peronism polarized the city; it stoked mob violence and visceral hate for Soviet Communism. Perón conceived of a ‘third way’ between Capitalism and Communism, but he simplified life into stark options. With an aversion for the oligarchy (Evita would scream to the crowds ‘Shall we burn down the Barrio Norte’?) and a reliance on trade unions, Peronism took root.

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Colonel Juan Domingo Perón (1893–1974), born illegitimate in Lobos, grew up in Patagonia. He went to the Colegio Militar aged fifteen. is officer’s school, founded by Sarmiento in 1870, followed Prussian discipline. Perón was appointed lecturer in military history and published four books. He applied the cunning and strategy learned over 32 years of study when he took over the Secretaría del Trabajo (Department of Labour) in the Axis-leaning coup of 1943 which made General Ramírez president. He became vice president in 1944, retaining his power base as minister of work and war. He established the trade unions as equally powerful as the army, with the cgt (Confederación General de Trabajo/General Confederation of Labour) – founded in 1930 and housed on Azorpardo, 802 – in a Rationalist six-floor building opened by Perón in 1950. By 1951, 70 per cent of all workers were unionized – Peronism’s power base. Perón saw himself as an intellectual and admired Hannibal for his opportunism; Ray Joseph deemed him alert, cunning and ruthless. He looked like Gardel, the tango icon killed in 1933: the smooth face, the gomina-slicked-back hair, the constant white-toothed smile, the bow-tie, the polished riding boots, the soldier’s straight back, the apparently inarticulate macho. He had black eyes and was over six feet tall. He was also a fencing champion, a skilled shot and a ski instructor. He loved jokes and held court at the restaurant of tango singer Juan D’Arienzo. As a boxing fan, Perón was often at Luna Park (an art deco boxing ring on Corrientes and Bouchard built in 1934 after the original Luna Park, built in 1912, was demolished to build the Obelisco), where he, a widower, first met Evita at an event for victims of the San Juan earthquake in January 1944 (‘the chandeliers began to shake’, wrote Joseph in Buenos Aires at the time). She was a radio reporter running a programme on him. Perón’s charisma depended on his companion and wife Evita Duarte, her rabble-rousing speeches, her actress’s gleaming-lipstick appeal. What changed the city was how they congregated crowds of workers in the Plaza de Mayo, often given a day’s holiday and free public transport from the factories. ey stood there packed together, in awe, and listened to

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eva duarte, or evita Perón, and Juan domingo Perón, arriving in spain in 97.

speeches from Evita or Perón from the balcony of the Casa Rosada. Perón had been forced to resign from the military junta on 9 October 1944. By announcing this over the radio, he communicated with everybody instantly. Imprisoned on the island of Martín García, he was released thanks to the popular reaction of his supporters, the urban dispossessed. Between 150,000 and 1 million spontaneously massed in the Plaza de Mayo, so that this day, 17 October 1944, is a historic day in the Peronist calendar. Eva Perón (1919–1952) took the credit, though Luna had her simply sitting anguished all day in her drawing room. ey married four days later. ey first

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lived in adjoining flats on Posadas, 1567, fourth floor, never had children and adored their dogs. Perón’s reliance on Evita’s ability to scream speeches set a model often repeated (today by Cristina Fernández). Perón was elected as president on 4 June 1946 with 55 per cent of the vote. Promoted to general, he called his new party of 1947 the Partido Justicialista, implying social justice. In November 1951, after changing the constitution to be re-elected, he was voted in with 64 per cent. He remained in power until September 1955, when ousted from the Casa Rosada by a coup. After years of exile, he was elected a third time in 1973 and died in office in 1974. In 1947 Eva had won the vote for women, who then voted in the 1951 elections. at same year Perón had hoped to have her as his vice president, but the military refused her. A general strike was called. Workers massed on the Plaza de Mayo, calling for Evita. She at first accepted, but a week later, over the radio, she declined. Her last public appearance, when she was ill with cancer, was on 18 October, now Santa Evita day. However, the Peróns generated such loathing and adoration that a polarized, two-Argentina situation has continued to today, with infighting within the party following left-wing, guerrilla versions of such squabbles in the 1960s and ’70s to right-wing variants under Menem and left-wing ones again under the Kirchners. Enigmatic Perón towers over his successors like a padrino (mafia godfather). He had installed an authoritarian and verticalist power structure, based on the leader and elections, and made decisions directly. However, without Evita, he lost his grip on power. Before accompanying Perón, Evita had been a sexy, secondrate cinema and radio star. She used her acting skills to great effect. Once together in 1944, she became president of a social support foundation in her name (Fundación Ayuda Social María Eva Duarte) that capriciously gave gifts to the poor, from false teeth to sewing machines and fridges, out-rivalling the traditional upper-class charity, the Sociedad de Beneficiencia, who had snubbed her. She created thousands of schools, a children’s village and hospitals, had nurses trained and sent

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aid to earthquake victims and more, but she also wore priceless jewels. She claimed that the poor liked seeing her dressed up like a fairytale princess. Biographer Fleur Cowles, who met her, called her ‘Cinderella dressed by Dior’. She received over 12,000 letters a day and once in 1947 sent off 5,000,000 Christmas presents for children. Each New Year she’d send cider and cake to millions. e building specially tailored for her Fundación founded in 1949 is today’s monumental Facultad de Ingeniería, the university’s engineering faculty, on Avenida Paseo Colón, 850 (statues of Eva and Perón were pulled down from its top in 1955). She herself had a small office in the bulky Ministry of Labour on the Plaza de Mayo, with a direct phone link to Perón in the Casa Rosada. e British writer and traveller Miranda France visited her sparse, wood-panelled room, dominated by her desk, ‘the very heart of the Peronist revolution’. Both Perón and Evita, in her rodete (hair tied in a bun), got up early and worked tirelessly, on average fifteen hours a day. Lanata cites a day in Perón’s disciplined life: up at 6.30, then meticulous hard work, lunch and a siesta, more work and, after dinner, three to four hours reading every night. Such nervous energy and maniacal ambition ruined Evita’s health; in her later years gossips speculated that she was anaemic or had leukaemia; in fact, she was gravely ill with uterine cancer. She was clearly the more revolutionary of the couple; Mexican historian Enrique Krauze decided she was the twentieth century’s greatest demagogue. Her skill was spontaneous welfare; she acted on whim for her poor. Félix Luna refers to her terrible integrity. Visit the Museo Evita at Lafinur 2988 (once one of her hogares de tránsito, or women’s shelters) and hear her speeches. Talking to her followers or detractors you realize how impossible any compromise or dialogue was. During the Peronist years, Eva’s ghosted autobiography La razón de mi vida (1951) was planned to go on school reading lists (over 1,300,000 copies were printed); opponents bombed the offices of Peuser, her publisher, in 1951. When Eva died of her cancer, at the age of 33, she was announced as ‘having entered immortality at 20.25’; her

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embalmed body was put on view in the central hall of the Ministerio de Trabajo (now the Concejo Deliberante) at the corner of the Plaza de Mayo, where over 18,000 flowers were displayed and over 500,000 queued in the rain and cold (it was July, winter). Her corpse was then moved to the cgt (General Confederation of Labour) building as part of the 30 days of official mourning. By the end, over 2 million mourners had queued, sometimes for twenty blocks, to view the corpse. e Vatican received over 40,000 letters asking for her to be canonized. Historian Jill Hedges compares such extremes of mourning to that for Princess Diana. ere are countless legends concerning the Peróns, and every porteño has an opinion. Despite military attempts to discredit her, including burning her autobiography, Evita thrives in the popular imagination – on walls, in posters, in songs. A village called Ciudad Evita, near the Ezeiza airport, some 21 km from the Congreso, was founded in 1947. Here Spanish Colonial Revival houses form a profile portrait of Eva, complete with bun, visible from the air. ough the military twice changed its name in an attempt to squash the Evita myth, Ciudad Evita is now a national historical monument. In the 1940s Perón inherited an immensely wealthy nation, ranked seventh in the world. It had refused to take sides in the Second World War. Perón himself leaned towards the Axis governments and helped to relocate as many as 8,000 Nazis in Argentina. e large German contingent in Argentina numbered some 236,000 by 1938, with 22 German schools in Buenos Aires. Many were actively Nazi. Under Perón, there was a mood of mob violence, of state appropriations. Félix Luna defined early Peronism as ‘statism’, with the state buying out the British rail companies in 1948 at a bloated price of £150 million (celebrated with another cheering crowd on the Plaza de Mayo) and owning the gas companies, the main petrol company (ypf) and river and air transport. But even if there was full employment in a thirteen-month year (aguinaldo, one month’s extra salary), such massive state activity was inefficient. From 1949 the economy suffered. e winter of 1952 saw power cuts, meat restrictions, even black bread, a coarse rye

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P e r ó n , e V i Ta , P e r o n i s M a n d a n T i - P e r o n i s M , 9 –8 9

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The la Prensa building on av. de Mayo.

bread. Perón bought out the radio stations in order to coerce and seduce. He silenced critical, conservative newspapers like La Prensa (in 1951), with its magnificent 1896 building (one of the ‘marvels’ of the city according to Koebel, on the Avenida de Mayo, 575, now the Casa de Cultura), so that it relocated to Montevideo (again a city in opposition, as it was in the nineteenth century). He expropriated large estancias like the Pereyra Iraola (designed by Prilidiano Pueyrredón) in 1949 and turned it into a people’s park. There was a constant fear of his fanaticism and thug violence. He imprisoned his enemies, including society women like Jorge Luis Borges’s artist sister Norah and mother (reduced to house arrest because of her age) in 1948. No wonder Perón evoked Rosas.

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The missing CorPse oF eVA Perón

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in 1955, after Perón’s downfall, eva Perón Duarte’s carefully embalmed corpse was kidnapped, on General Aramburu’s order. He would later pay with his life for this act. The perfectly coiffed corpse was hidden in a cinema in Belgrano, in an empty corner of the Palacio de Aguas Corrientes on Avenida Córdoba, then in a lorry in the street before being buried secretly in Milan. She was clearly more dangerous dead than alive. That the military did not know what to do with the embalmed corpse was clear, if only from their attempts to conceal it. What happened to evita’s body remained a mystery at the time, with countless versions, until, sixteen years later in 1971, the embalmed body was returned to Perón in his exile home just outside Madrid. There it remained in the attic, with José López Rega ‘consulting’ it over what actions to take in the dreadful Triple A assassinations he organized against left-wing opponents. it was finally sent to the Familia Duarte mausoleum in the Recoleta in 1976, and still lies there under a concrete floor. The corpse cannot be seen, but was restored after its long posthumous journey. Tomás eloy Martínez’s novel Santa Evita (1995) elaborates on this bizarre odyssey. The myth of evita the montonera (making her the spiritual leader of the Montoneros guerrilla group) still lives on and is extremely potent. it’s odd that she is not buried with her husband Perón, but maybe there is sense in their separation, for her version of Peronism today is more relevant that her husband’s.

The embalmed corpse of evita, who died in 95.

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e city reflected Peronism with Mussolini-type monumental buildings, like the already-noted Eva Perón Fundación building and the similar-looking Facultad de Derecho (law faculty) on Avenida Figueroa Alcorta, 2263, with its fourteen columns and five massive doors, built in 1949. Equally drab and cumbersome, with a vast dome, is the Banco de la Nación Argentina on Rivadavia, 326, designed by Alejandro Bustillo in 1937 and completed in 1955. It takes up a whole block. Another example of Peronist building is the Casa Colectiva Martín Rodríguez in La Boca on Rodríguez and Mendoza, built as social housing in 1943. Close to this monumentality was the Rationalist style exemplified in the Automóvil Club Argentina (aca), founded in 1904, situated on Avenida Libertador, 1850. Built in 1940 by Antonio V. Vilar, with the firm Sánchez, Lagos & de la Torre, this sober rectangle of twelve storeys, with a vast, 24-pump petrol station underneath, once contained a famous confitería. While Perón was haranguing the crowds of his supporters during a mass demonstration in the Plaza de Mayo in April 1953, two bombs were detonated in metro (subte) entrances and six people died. In revenge Perón incited his followers to attack the privileged, so they burned down the aristocratic Jockey Club on Florida (destroying its art collection and library), the Petit Café, the Socialist Party headquarters and the Casa Radical. Firemen refused to attend. Enemies were rounded up, tortured and imprisoned. In 1954 Perón confronted the Catholic Church, calling certain priests traitors and false Peronists. In 1955, after a speech promoting divorce and brothels (closed since 1936) and banning Church education in schools, the Vatican excommunicated him. Five days after an anti-Peronist Corpus Christi march of 11 June 1955, the Navy rebelled and bombed the Casa Rosada and machinegunned the crowds on the Plaza de Mayo, killing 355 (Lanata calculates 1,000). Bullet holes and a plaque on the Ministerio de Economía building attest to this. After Perón’s most violent speech, on 31 August (his swansong according to historian Luis Alberto Romero), which advocated violence to counter violence (‘five for one’), Peronist crowds retaliated by burning

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down the Curia Metropolitana (next to the Cathedral) and its archives, as well as many churches such as San Francisco, San Ignacio (which also lost its archives in the flames), La Merced and La Piedad. Perón lamely resigned on 22 September, not wanting to be responsible for more deaths, and like Rosas before him, slipped away in a warship (to exile in Paraguay, Venezuela and finally Franco’s Madrid). From 1955 the military, led by General Eduardo Lonardi for two months, then General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, dominated an anti-Peronist period where Perón remained in exile and his party was banned from the sporadic elections that were held. e Peróns’ home where Eva died, the Palacio Unzué (with nearly 300 rooms and a ays-designed garden), which had been appropriated in 1937 to become the president’s summer residence, was razed. On the spot now stands the Biblioteca Nacional. General Aramburu acted like Sarmiento, demolishing Rosas’s Palermo mansion. Perón’s regime ensured the end of Argentina’s Paris dream. e smart city ran out of funds to maintain the roads and walkways, and even today, the pavements cause many to trip and the roads are pockmarked – an ongoing local lament. Perón tried to return in 1964, but got as far as Brazil when he was returned. However, exile and the banning of his party, even his name in newspapers (you couldn’t even refer to him), increased his personal standing. All over the city walls, graffiti announced ‘Perón is returning’. us, Peronist Buenos Aires displays battle scars from bullets and bombs and projects images of workingclass crowds and a continuing hostility between supporters and opponents. After the ‘Revolución Libertadora’ (or better, coup) of 1955, the military ruled until 1982. e ousting of Perón in 1955 led to another spontaneous crowd in the Plaza de Mayo, which cheered his demise. In his widowhood, Perón had shocked his enemies, known as gorilas, by dating pubescent girls and driving about on a white Vespa wearing a baseball cap, so his deposition contributed to public relief. Belsunce and Floria call the seventeen years following Perón’s departure ‘la Argentina violenta’, with reason. e military sacked everybody holding

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public posts since 1946; Congress was closed and the unions were taken over. General Aramburu lasted until 1958 and let elections take place, but banned Peronist candidates. Later, in 1970, twelve Peronist urban guerrillas announcing themselves as Montoneros (in reference to the nineteenth-century bandits) kidnapped Aramburu in what Romero ‘baptized’ as their official birth. ey shot him dead with a pistol in reprisal for not revealing the whereabouts of Evita’s tomb, and for executing pro-Peronist General Valle in the Penitenciaría Nacional. Later, in 1974, the Montoneros stole his corpse from the Aramburu Recoleta crypt designed by Bustillo (it was bizarrely recovered later the same year near Parque Las Heras). Arturo Frondizi, a Radical and a well-reputed intellectual, sought national unity and won the election in 1958, absorbing the Peronist vote. For congressional and provincial elections in 1962 he allowed the Peronists to vote for their own candidates. He also held a secret meeting with Che Guevara in 1961 when Che was Fidel Castro’s Minister for Industry, which was Frondizi’s doom and he was chucked into prison by the military. Vice President José María Guido took over, but lasted 562 days in power. en Arturo Illia, a doctor from Córdoba,

Biblioteca nacional, from av. las heras.

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nicknamed ‘e Turtle’ (because he looked like one), was voted in as the next president in 1963, but he too was booted out. e military then ruled between 1966 and 1973, with the ultra-Catholic General Onganía, called ‘Argentina’s Franco’ by Lanata, as a hard-man president up to 1970, when he too was sacked, becoming the ninth president ousted since 1930. His dictatorship saw the rise of urban guerrillas at the time when Che Guevara had been hunted down and shot in Bolivia in 1967. Onganía closed the university in 1966, that ‘cave of Marxists’ in his lingo, in what was known as the ‘night of the long sticks’, when eminent scientists were hustled out of their rooms and beaten with batons; as many as 301 chose exile, including the team working on Argentina’s first Ferranti-built computer; the city suffered a disastrous brain-drain. Onganía ranted against long hair, kissing in public, the birth control pill and miniskirts. At this time, Buenos Aires, ever eager to be avidly up-to-date, welcomed happenings and hippies. In 1962 Jacobo Timerman launched his trendy weekly magazine Primera Plana. It promoted independent theatre, Pop Art and the Latin American literary boom. is boom was led by Gabriel García Márquez, whose Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) was first published by Sudamericana in Buenos Aires in 1967 and who arrived in the freezing winter city in 1967, in a tropical shirt, to meet his publishers. General Onganía closed Primera Plana in 1969. Timerman would then run a Le Monde-type newspaper called La Opinión, with few photos, until he was kidnapped and tortured, writing a slim book about his ordeal. Abetting this cultural promotion was the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (known as the Di Tella), sited on Florida (always the fashionable pedestrian street) by the Plaza San Martín, in a building converted by architects Francisco Bullrich and Clorindo Testa. It became the magnet for the trendy long-haired and short-skirted and sought to be avant-garde and outrageous, embodied by Marta Minujín, still provocative in 2011 with her large sculpture made from books, Tower of Babel, on Plaza San Martín (but no longer there). e Di Tella concentrated on theatre, music and the arts in a zone that became known as ‘La Manzana Loca’

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Claudia magazine map of ‘la Manzana loca’, 970s.

(Mad Block), mocking the historic Manzana de las Luces, and included the university’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, established in 1896 on Viamonte (since moved), a French bookshop and galleries. e nearby Bar-O-Bar was a meeting place. Torcuato Di Tella was a rich industrialist and art collector, famous for cars and fridges (one of his sons, Guido di Tella, became a Peronist Foreign Minister under Menem). is centre, unique in Latin America, closed in 1970, mainly due to financial shortcomings, and possibly pressure from the military. e peak year was 1967, when nearly 400,000 people visited, as the literary critic John King has shown. What seemed purely sartorial and artistic had become dangerous: long hair and beards became associated with guerrilleros and art had turned subversively political. A noteworthy trait of the times was the rise of psychoanalysis, with Buenos Aires vying with New York for the proportion of therapists attending patients, one for every 120 inhabitants. ere’s a Villa Freud in Palermo, near the Botanical Gardens, and a shared lingo derived from psychoanalysis. e Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina was founded in 1942, with Arnaldo Rascovsky (1908–1995) and Enrique Pichon Rivière (1907–1977) as leading analysts. Oscar Masotta (1930–1979) led the Lacanian variant, opening his Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires on Charcas, 2650, in 1974, so that Buenos Aires followed Paris in offering this subversive

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variant. In the 1970s, many analysts figured on death lists and chose exile. So, despite military dictatorships, the city modernized itself. One of the first skyscrapers in the city’s skyline along Puerto Madero was the Sheraton Hotel, built by architects Santiago Sánchez Elías, Federico Peralta Ramos and Alfredo Agostini in 1970. Another visible change was the overhead motorway allowing quick access to Ezeiza airport. But the most eyecatching ’60s building was Clorindo Testa’s (and sepra Studio’s) ex-Bank of London and South America, part of Lloyds from 1918 and since 1997 the Banco Hipotecario, at Reconquista 101 – a Brutalist masterpiece designed in 1959 and completed in 1966, its foundation stone laid by the Duke of Edinburgh in March 1962. General Alejandro Lanusse, while president in 1973, decided to allow Peronism back into presidential elections. e party had been proscribed for eighteen years. Perón, aged 77, could not stand because of a residency clause, so his faithful supporter, Dr Cámpora, stood for him, and was elected in 1973, often seen as a watershed year. Cámpora, a dentist nicknamed ‘El Tío’ (Uncle), who had been imprisoned in 1955, freed 370 political prisoners from the Devoto prison. His name, La Cámpora, has been adopted by a direct-action group. He resigned after 49 days to allow Perón and his wife Isabelita to be voted in on a majority of 61.85 per cent, a husband-andwife team that Evita didn’t manage. Perón at first had the backing of the Montoneros, the Marxist Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (erp, People’s Revolutionary Army) guerrillas and the Juventud Peronista (a Revolutionary Peronist youth movement), but he turned against them, insulting them in a massive meeting on the Plaza de Mayo as imbeciles and imberbes (beardless), whereupon they showily abandoned the crowd. ere had been a gun battle on 20 June on the highway to the airport as Perón’s plane was due, with up to 3 million supporters eagerly awaiting his landing, the largest mass gathering ever according to Hedges, but the flight deviated to a military airport. No exact figures for those killed have emerged (13? 25?). Buenos Aires then became an

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ugly battlefield between the different revolutionary groups, the army and an underground right-wing death squad called the Triple A (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina), organized by the ex-police corporal and sinister theosophist José López Rega. Nicknamed ‘El Brujo’ (Wizard), he controlled the Peróns and allegedly communicated with Evita’s embalmed corpse. He fled the country in 1975, was arrested in the United States in 1986 and died in prison in Buenos Aires in 1989. Unmarked green Ford Falcons cruised Buenos Aires, with the city’s armed occupants assassinating and disappearing people. Perón died on 1 July 1974 from a heart attack. As Hedges argues, he incarnated Argentinidad, the spirit of Argentineness, so that the lunfardo word chanta – crook, trickster – sums him up. His widow Isabelita, or María Estela Martínez (b. 1931), a nightclub dancer some 35 years younger who he’d met in Panama and who had once danced at the Colón, became president. Isabelita was Argentina’s first female president and she lasted 632 days. e coup of 24 March 1976 – during the first days of which relief in the city was palpable – revealed a new triumvirate of military dictators, with General Jorge Videla (nicknamed ‘Eel’ by the writer Tomás Eloy Martínez) in charge, backed by Admiral Emilio Massera (who dreamed of becoming a second Perón) and air force commander Orlando Agosti, in what they called the ‘Proceso de Reorganización Nacional’, or ‘El Proceso’ – e Process – for short. eir ambition was to steer Argentina back to a Christian society. ey again proscribed Peronism and undertook a dirty war against the guerrilla Left that led to 8,961 documented disappearances – though some human rights organizations claim as many as 20,000 disappeared – without trial, without habeas corpus, in what Verbitsky labelled the greatest tragedy in Argentine history. Catholic missionary zeal quickly soured in the lawless orgy of bullets and propaganda. On the Plaza de Mayo a group of brave mothers wearing white scarves, Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, began a silent vigil in 1977, walking around the Pirámide monument celebrating the May Revolution of 1810 every ursday at 3.30 p.m., seeking the whereabouts of their disappeared daughters and

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sons. Founder Azucena Villaflor de Devicenti was ‘disappeared’ in December 1977, drugged and chucked from a helicopter out at sea in one of what became known as the ‘death flights’. Over the years, these women have become the abuelas (grandmothers) seeking out their missing grandchildren (many captured guerrillera were mothers who were allowed to give birth, then killed). Led by the determined Hebe de Bonafini (who had two children disappeared), they have so far rescued 103 nietos (grandchildren) from having been adopted by military couples. e Fundación de las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo has, since 2006, built over 5,000 homes for the poor, though recent (May 2011) revelations show they had a corrupt ex-murderer as business partner. Much of this illegal ‘war’ took place in the city. In 1995, Verbitsky interviewed a naval officer from the infamous torture centre, the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (esma) on Avenida Libertador, 8151, who loaded drugged prisoners into a plane and dropped them in the river. is naval centre, with its imposing four-columned Greek-style facade, set in seven hectares of land, saw some 5,000 kidnapped victims pass through it so that ‘its walls talk’. A witness recalled the passageway to the torture rooms being called the ‘Avenue of Happiness’; loud music was played to stifle screams and priests were at hand. At esma in 2003 President Kirchner, before a crowd of 60,000, announced that this complex would become a Museum of Memory named after Haroldo Conti (1925– 1976), a writer who died under torture there, his body never recovered. e army finally vacated it in 2007. Only now are torturers and military dictators being re-arrested and condemned in court (there’s no death penalty). During the dictatorship Buenos Aires also lived a spurious economic boom under the Chicago-style economic plans of the economy minister Martínez de Hoz – from the landed oligarchy – known as the epoch of plata dulce or ‘sweet money’ (associated with dulce de leche, a sweetened, caramelized milk jam). Porteños anaesthetized themselves from the violent politics, pretending not to know what was happening by travelling to Miami and returning loaded with consumerist goods.

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e invasion of the Malvinas/Falklands in 1982, long claimed on Argentine maps and in school syllabuses by Perón, was ordered by General Galtieri, leader of the dictators and mocked as a drunkard. Supported by crowds on the Plaza de Mayo, the invasion touched a sore patriotic spot. e story is well known. Prime Minister Margaret atcher (‘La Tácher’) recaptured the islands and re-won her next election thanks to this post-imperial ‘glory’, while the Argentine military dictators were disgraced and, in a historical irony, defeat ushered in democracy. is brief war left its mark, with posters and graffiti still, today, reclaiming the Malvinas, war veterans begging on streets, demonstrations claiming compensation and a black marble monument naming over 649 Argentine dead off Plaza San Martín. e Juramento underground station of line D in Belgrano shows the story of the sinking of the Belgrano cruiser. During the distant war itself, there was a shared porteño support for ‘our boys’ when thousands knitted and gave jewels for the war effort, but most of the dead were on obligatory military service, and from poor rural families. It remained a tv war and Buenos Aires was not threatened. Anything British was changed, however: the Plaza Británica, with the clock tower, became the Plaza de la Fuerza Aérea (Air Force Square); the famous London Grill restaurant where Borges would eat became the Grill (since closed); the English Club, founded in 1893 on the 25 de Mayo, took down its plaque; and the Chelsea Pub became just ‘Che’ (as Graham-Yooll observed). In the 1983 elections human rights lawyer Raúl Alfonsín (1927–2009) won the presidency as a Radical with 51.74 per cent. He celebrated Peronism’s first electoral defeat with crowds on the Plaza de Mayo, but broke tradition by speaking from the historic cabildo, not the Casa Rosada. He used his lawyer’s skills to finally introduce divorce in 1987, but also to bring the military to court to end impunity (urban guerrilla leaders were also put on trial). To document the atrocities, Alfonsín set up a Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (conadep), chaired by writer Ernesto Sabato (1911–2011). e report was published in 1985 as Nunca Más (Never Again), with Sabato’s prologue, identifying 8,961

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harrowing cases. Top military leaders were put on trial and condemned from April 1985 in a civilian court. is had never happened in Latin America before. But behind the scenes the military made threats, so the Ley de Punto Final (Full Stop Law), which prohibited further trials, was signed in 1986. It was also weakly accepted that torture and other war crimes were enacted by personnel who were following orders, under the law of Obediencia Debida (Due Obedience). However, there were still three attempted military coups: during Easter 1987, in January 1988 and in December 1988. Later, in 1989–90, President Menem signed a clemency order for the coup’s leaders, including Mario Firmenich of the Montoneros. But in 2001 all cases were reopened as the previous laws had been deemed ‘unconstitutional’. During this long period of trials and laws the monolithic Palacio de Justicia symbolized democratic rule of law. It covers a city block, with columns, patios and passages, a veritable ‘Kafkan’ labyrinth (Kafka is commonly adjectivized in Buenos Aires). French architect Norbert Maillart designed it in 1904. It was semi-ready by 1910, though not completed, by other architects, until 1942. Strangely, Maillart never visited Buenos Aires. Inside the huge entrance hall, there’s a sculpture called La Justicia by Yrurtia; it also houses the largest law library in Latin America. is seven-floored neo-Greek anachronism is known as ‘Tribunales’. In this city, lawyers rule porteño society. Quesada complained that in the 1820s notaries, judges, officials and lawyers constituted a ‘veritable social phalanx’. Today, trámites (red tape), laws, bureaucratic queues and paperwork continue to dominate daily life. ‘Tribunales’ faces the front of the Colón opera house, the neoclassical school, Escuela Presidente Julio A. Roca (built by Italian-born Carlos Morra in 1902) and Buenos Aires’s first synagogue (Sinagoga Central) of 1897, rebuilt in 1934 with its large Star of David on the porch. Facing Tribunales is Plaza Lavalle, with its statue of Lavalle (1887) by the Italian Piero Costa on a tall column. Tribunales’ architect Maillart also built the Palacio del Correo or main Post Office, another whole block with ‘interminable halls’, with its entrance to the

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inflation: the  million pesos ley banknote, issued in 98.

public at Sarmiento 151 and monumentally mimicking the u.s. Post Office’s two blocks in Midtown Manhattan. Started in 1888 and finished in 1928, it has seven floors, four towers, stained-glass windows and a grand hall. e postal service was privatized in 1997. Alvaro Abós labelled this defunct building an architectural dinosaur, a funereal mausoleum to Argentina’s lost public faith. Its message, according to architect Guillermo Tella, is ‘state power’. All in all, a notable cluster of historic buildings. Alfonsín inherited 600 per cent inflation when he became president in 1983. He tried to revitalize the economy by changing the currency from pesos to australes with his Plan Austral of June 1985 (in fact, a shock devaluation), plus a vain dream to move the capital 500 km south to a site on the Río Negro near Carmen de Patagones, imitating Brasilia. But economic devastation and hyperinflation, with dramatic looting of supermarkets in 1988, forced Alfonsín to stand down five months early. By now Argentina had slipped from eighth place in the world measured by gdp per person to 66th in 1990 (currently 62nd, according to the imf). Black-market dollar speculation allowed some relief from mad daily price rises. If Alfonsín had failed economically, few doubted his integrity. Imprisoned by Perón back in 1953, he was a lone voice opposing the Malvinas conflict. He died in 2009 in his flat on Avenida Santa Fe. His funeral cortège to the Recoleta was followed by thousands.

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arlos Saúl Menem (b. 1930), a Peronist lawyer from La Rioja and son of a pedler of Syrian descent, became Argentina’s 33rd president in 1989 with 49.18 per cent and won again in 1995. A shrewd and flamboyant playboy, he did two things that affected city life. e first was to deal with inflation as high as 5,000 per cent; shops were unable to price goods as inflation rose too fast in a single day. e u.s. dollar became the real currency as a hedge against austral inflation. Menem decided, in 1991, to restore the peso and then make it equal with the u.s. dollar, to end black-market speculation and inflation. By 1994 inflation was down to 3.9 per cent and this led to a period of economic growth, with property price rises (property is still quoted in dollars by estate agents) and large salaries, making porteños feel equal to Europeans and North Americans. ough formerly imprisoned by the military dictatorship, Menem decided also to pardon the military leaders in court cases regarding torture and murder. He also followed Ronald Reagan and Margaret atcher in a dubious privatization plan (oil, gas, Aerolíneas Argentinas, the subte, even the Palermo zoo) that filled the pockets of many of those carrying out the negotiations. Some efficiency became noticeable in everyday life, especially the state-owned entel telephones that really began to work when sold to a Spanish firm (up to then the telephone system was a national joke). Menem also broke the curse of the National Library, left unfinished for 30 years, and it formally opened in 1992. He ended the dreaded compulsory military service (la colimba). His divorce from his wife Zulema (whom he fetched from Syria to marry) became a national spectacle, a soap opera, and he lost his son in a bizarre

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helicopter crash that spawned gossip about drugs and the Argentine mafia. He was close to wealthy businessman Alfredo Yabrán, who had a journalist investigating his shady customs affairs murdered. He then killed himself, though some doubt that version as he had just sold his business for $605 million. Menem was accused of selling illegal weapons and drugs, and was placed under house arrest (but soon released by cronies). He acted the old-style provincial or federal caudillo with silvery sideburns, imitating Rosas (he brought Rosas’s corpse back to the Recoleta in 1989 from Southampton), and enjoyed fast Ferrari cars and beautiful women; typically, he invited the pop star Madonna to pizza in the Casa Rosada. Menem loved dressing up in the national shirt and playing football and he made Maradona a roving ambassador for Argentina. Later, with a facelift, he married ex-Miss Chile, Cecilia Bolocco, and had a son at the age of 73 (and then soon divorced). Menem’s dream may have been making Argentina a first-world country, but critic Edna Aizenberg reports that he was paid $10 million in hush money. However, Menem’s presidency left actual scars in the city. e corner of Suipacha and Arroyo, site of the bombing of the Israel Embassy in 1992 that left 29 dead, has been transformed into a little memorial plaza with lime trees and names of those killed on a plaque. Another terrorist, anti-Zionist and still unpunished act was the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (amia, founded in 1945 as a Jewish community centre) on Pasteur, 633, in the Once barrio, killing 89 people and destroying a library and archives, with Iranian terrorists blamed. ese outrages could have been retaliation for Menem’s pro-u.s. Middle East policy. But the named perpetrators remain free. In 2012 an agreement was reached with Teheran over trying the suspects in Iran. Argentina’s Jewish community (preponderantly Ashkenazi) of some 200,000 is the largest in Latin America. e first wave arrived in 1890, with the largest influx between 1920 and 1936. ey lived around Plaza Lavalle, where the first synagogue stands. Nearby is found the Museo Judío de Buenos Aires on Libertad, 769, founded in 1967, with a permanent collection documenting

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Jewish immigration, from Baron Hirsch’s bringing of poor Jews to the country, to the Jewish gauchos. Exhibitions there have included one about Jewish tango players. e new amia building is a bunker, a ‘gray hulk’, in Aizenberg’s words. e creation of modern, glitzy Puerto Madero, known as the ‘island’, with its towers and offices along the huge old docks symbolizes this Menemista city. Amalia Fortabat, Peronist art patron, situated her stunning art museum, designed by Rafael Viñoly, in Puerto Madero, at Dique 4. e Torre Fortabat, a separate building on Viamonte and Bouchard, home to her business, is a delightful, mirrored, modern tower, designed by Peralta Ramos and others, while the Hilton on Macacha Güemes, 351, designed by Mario Álvarez, with its seven-storeyed glass atrium, is another example. Menem donated land for the building of a vast mosque (South America’s largest) off Palermo called the Centro Islámico Rey Fahd, on Avenida Bullrich, 55. Menem’s presidency also saw, in December 1990, the last military uprising of the so-called Carapintadas (Painted Faces), when thirteen died. Lastly, the shopping (shopping mall) epitomizes this period: the reconversion of the vegetable market El Abasto in 1999 and the building of Alto Palermo on Avenida Santa Fe in 1990 being the best two examples. The cattle auction business founded by Adolfo Bullrich in 1867 moved to the grand building at Libertador 740–50 in 1921 (architect Juan Waldrop) and was redesigned in 1988 as the Patio Bullrich Shopping Centre (by architect Juan Carlos López) for the smart set, with another entrance on Posadas. It was the first shopping centre to allow people to escape the streets and climate in the total environment of the mall, to shop, eat and see films. e latest of the city’s fifteen shoppings is Recoleta Mall, by the cemetery on Junín and Vicente López. Before malls there were and are galerías – passages with shops cutting through buildings, like the Galería del Este joining Florida and Maipú or the grand Galería Güemes linking San Martín and Florida. Social critic Beatriz Sarlo analysed these new malls as attempts to break free of the real city into an ordered and safe world, free from climate and smells, with

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constant light. e mall, for example, can be sited anywhere – by a motorway, say – as it doesn’t need the city. Inside, people drift around, ogling what’s on show. Menem’s economic policy of dollar parity, continued by his successor, Radical president Fernando de la Rúa (b. 1937; elected in 1999 on an Alliance ticket with 48.5 per cent and on a wave of anti-corruption votes), crashed on 21 December 2001. De la Rúa, a dull lawyer, had been the city’s first elected ‘mayor’ in 1996 and was known as ‘straight’. But he lost control. Economics minister Domingo Cavallo, a hero inherited from Menem’s team, froze savings to halt capital flight; banks collapsed and the country defaulted to the tune of $95 billion (though there are no exact figures), the largest in history. Riots and looting of supermarkets ensued. At a violent demonstration on the Plaza de Mayo as many as 27 died and over 400 were injured. De la Rúa instituted a state of siege, then fled the Casa Rosada in a helicopter. Crowds again filled the Plaza de Mayo. Angry investors stormed banks as their savings had vanished, the infamous corralito (corral). Most strikingly,

original warehouse buildings in the new barrio Puerto Madero.

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demonstrators took to balconies and streets banging pots and pans, creating the din known round the world as the cacerolazo. People screamed ‘Qué se vayan todos!’ (‘All of them must go!’). De la Rúa’s resignation created a vacuum as his vice president had withdrawn months before. He was temporarily replaced by Ramón Puerta for three days, then by Adolfo Rodríguez Saá for seven days, then Puerta again for a day, then Eduardo Camani for two days and finally by Eduardo Duhalde’s (b. 1941) interim presidency from 2 January 2002 – five presidents within eleven days. is period was characterized by bankruptcies, farm crises, food shortages and the use of the patacón, paper money issued not by the state but by the province of Buenos Aires. By May 2002, 53 per cent of the Argentine population lived in poverty, with more cacerolazos. In the April 2003 election that followed, Duhalde stood down as promised after liberating the peso from the dollar, in effect creating a devaluation, and Menem tried his luck against a newcomer from Santa Cruz in Patagonia, Néstor Kirchner (1950–2010), then withdrew when he realized he would lose. Without a second round, Kirchner won with a low 22 per cent. Helped by record agriculture exports, he amassed dollars to pay debts (holding the dollar down and escaping the curse of speculation). Kirchner also worked hard to make people pay taxes as black-market activity is high. A new era of left-wing Peronism began under relaxed, informal Kirchner, nicknamed ‘Penguin’ (he was from Patagonia). People continue to pour into the city, but recent immigrants tend not to be European. If you take a micro from the Bus Terminal in Retiro, you will drive past one of the city’s older villas miseria (number 31), erected along unused railway lines and land. With tight streets and brightly painted houses in a ‘medieval’-type city within the city, this is one of 23 shanty towns in Buenos Aires (there are 819 in greater Buenos Aires). Early arrivals came from the Argentine countryside. For example, Diego Maradona’s family from Esquina in Corrientes built their shanty in Villa Fiorito. He described a two-room shack without running water for his parents and their eight children. When it rained, it leaked; they suffered

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from heat and cold. He was saved by his footballing genius. Later arrivals were Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians, who have brought their own cultures and foods. ere are many Peruvian stalls and restaurants, for example, in the Once, formerly a Jewish quarter. The city’s population increased between 2001 and 2006 by 6.6 per cent, but the villas increased by 57 per cent. Many villeros invade the city at twilight, just before the black plastic rubbish bags are collected, and they rifle through and take whatever can be recycled. ese cartoneros (from cartón, cardboard) arrive by special trains and rattling lorries and use skinny nags and carts; they wait silently for rubbish to be dumped on the pavements every evening. Most buildings are blocks of flats, so rubbish is collected every day. ese immigrants have ‘latinamericanized’ the city, with vast illegal street markets around the Once station called Once Elefantes and Punto Once, and La Salada near the Riachuelo, the largest in Latin America. Barrio Charrúa is 80 per cent Bolivian, calculated at some 102,000. Another wave of immigrants are called chinos but are mainly South Koreans and Taiwanese (some 40,000), who toil in small supermarkets to make money. Néstor Kirchner’s version of Peronism owes more to Evita’s spontaneous revolutionary fervour than Perón’s Machiavellianism. His widow Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (b. 1953) continues as president today after her first four years from October 2007 as the first elected woman president. She was re-elected in October 2011 with an increased majority of 54 per cent. Of course, there was a celebration in the Plaza de Mayo, where the president danced with the crowd. ‘Kirchnerismo’ is associated with human rights, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and decisions to annul the earlier amnesties. Néstor Kirchner’s interpretation of popular democracy was to allow street demonstrations – the piqueteros – or the surrounding of unpopular politicians with chanting crowds (escratches) and to confront the hostile criticism of conservative newspapers like La Nación and Clarín. A sign of this concern is the Parque de la Memoria at Avenida Costanera Norte, Rafael Obligado 6745, near the Ciudad

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wall with the names of the disappeared, in Parque de la Memoria.

Universitaria on the riverbank in 14 hectares of park, with names of the disappeared on walls. ere are sculptures by William Tucker and Dennis Oppenheim and three tall triangles, with metal balls as heads (perhaps his three disappeared, ‘adopted’ children), by Roberto Aizenberg. It opened in 2007. Another sign is the turning of the torture block esma into a cultural centre. e date of the 1976 coup, 24 March, is now celebrated as the ‘Día de la Memoria’. Another memorial, of a different kind, commemorates the 194 young people who were burned to death when a fire broke out on 20 December 2004 at a rock concert at the República Cromanón club (safety doors were locked). It has become a santuario (popular or street shrine) by the Plaza Miserere, with a section of wall filled with photographs and hand-written messages. ‘Seguridad en la calle’ (street safety) affects everybody. No one is immune from street crimes, car hijackings or shootings. Hence shutters on shops, railings around plazas, and private guards. Many stores and restaurants lock their doors so that you have to ring a bell to enter. Gated villages (countries) are also on the rise and many porteños travel into the city from these guarded havens. High inflation – at around

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Buenos aires

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25 per cent – is another dreaded memory that has returned. At the same time, the city seems to be recuperating its past, thanks to a law of November 2007 prohibiting demolishing pre-1941 buildings (although putting it into practice is another matter). A new Area de Protección Histórica for the ‘City’ (Catedral al Norte) covers some 192 historical buildings from Harrods to the ex-Banco Boston. New buildings cannot rise more than ten floors. For example, since pedestrianizing Suipacha and Reconquista, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, built in 1783, has opened its Convento de San Ramón into a courtyard with busy restaurants, a fountain and trees . . . and so the city mutates.

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PoPe FrAnCisCo i

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Jorge Bergoglio (b. 1936) became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, then a Cardinal in 2001 before finally becoming Latin America’s first pope. Francisco i (Francis i), named after St Francis of Assisi, is the son of an immigrant and speaks perfect italian. After studying chemistry and teaching literature (including Borges’s works), he was ordained a Jesuit in 1969. He is orthodox and humble, very keen to help the poor and to return to Gospel values. As archbishop, he would make his own breakfast and took a number 70 colectivo to work in villa 21–4. He was never into Liberation Theology, and has been accused by ex-guerrillas of not doing enough during the last dictatorship. He confronted the Kirchners over their extravagant lifestyle (President Cristina Fernández’s assets have risen over 900 per cent since being in power), and especially resented her law permitting gay marriage. Bergoglio called this a ‘war on God’, and the president called him a medievalist. The morning he was inaugurated as pope in Rome, in 2013, over 50,000 faithful congregated in the Plaza de Mayo at 5 a.m. to support their new porteño pope. At the time of writing, his first beatification will be of a priest, Carlos de Dios Murias, who was disappeared in 1976. Less well known is that the new pope is a fan of the football club San Lorenzo de Almagro, known as ‘Los Santos’ of Boedo, a working-class barrio.

Pope francis with President Cristina fernández.

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The Mataderos neighbourhood on a Sunday.

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THE CITY TODAY

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Gardel’s statue in the Chacarita cemetery.

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Gardel’s Smoking Statue

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T

ango has made a comeback. When I first arrived in Buenos Aires most of the young I met listened to rock music. Tango was the music of reactionary old men. Yet over the last decades dancing the tango in milongas (tango dancehalls), a passionate and intricate ritual, driven by the male dancer’s tight body-grip, has revived. Yet the tango’s nostalgic lilt also expresses something about the city itself. I felt the key was in the myth of the legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel. What has he left behind? I start with the legend of the constantly lit cigarette in the outstretched hand of the statue, nicknamed ‘the smiling bronze’, by sculptor Manuel de Llano on Gardel’s tomb in the Chacarita cemetery (lote 21/22, tablón 8, manzana 2, sección 1). Did fans constantly replace his smouldering cigarettes? Over several visits, I’ve not once seen the lighted cig. The slum area where Gardel and tango grew up, on present-day Avenida Corrientes, has been erased. The grand fruit-and-vegetable market, the city’s equivalent of Covent Garden or Les Halles, has been converted into the Abasto Mall, an air-conditioned shopping centre with cinemas and restaurants. Known as ‘El Morocho de Abasto’ (Dark One from Abasto), Gardel has given his name to the Gardel subte stop on Línea B. All Gardel would recognize today is the mall’s outer shell, but the backstreets have remained shabby and this rundown area around a barrio called the Abasto, with colourfully decorated tango bars and shops, is Gardel-land. To recover the tango past, I strolled to the nearby Museo Gardel on Jean Jaurés, 735. The house was his last home, which he shared with his mother from 1927 to his death in 1935. It’s a typical Argentine casa chorizo (sausage-shaped house), with

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rooms along a glassed-in patio. Gardel always lived with his mother, who survived immigration as an ironing lady. Already we’re in mythic territory, for Gardel was born abroad in Toulouse in 1890, father unknown, though some argue that he was born in Tacuarembó, uruguay, in 1887. He arrived as a poor immigrant aged two years, three months. He lied about his French origins and changed his name from Charles romuald Gardés to Carlos Gardel. By 1911 he had invented himself as a singer, nicknamed ‘El Zorzal’ (The Song Thrush, a songbird, often caged). He is credited with changing tangos from dance music to songs with lyrics, sung in a goup, with ‘Mi noche triste’ (My Sad night) in 1917. He found fame in local bars in the Abasto like the Café de los Angelitos, where he’d meet boxer Luis Angel Firpo (‘Wild Bull of the Pampas’), and also in bars in La Boca; then his fame quickly spread through radio and film. But he remained a denizen of the underworld and was adicto al turf, owning racehorses and always betting. In the public eye, he became his image – greased-down, parted black hair (engominado, slicked down with hair cream), a white-toothed smile, a double-breasted suit and, of course, his lovely voice and clear diction. He had a tendency toward being plump, drank maté incessantly and spoke in lunfardo, the underworld slang. This complex, secretive man became the archetypal Argentine male, mirrored later by Perón, for example. As Simon Collier, a biographer, noted, Gardel was an enthusiastic supporter of the 1930 fascist coup. no wonder tango appealed to ageing male reactionaries. Gardel’s unexpected death shocked the world, for he was at the height of his fame. He was on tour in Colombia. On 24 June 1935, as his plane was taking off it crashed into another one and all seventeen on board died in the flames, including his librettist Alfredo Le Pera. The Museo Gardel shows him singing ‘Mi Buenos Aires querido’. Most porteños I know can sing that song, and especially when abroad, as it expresses a shared nostalgia for the city. The city features in the title of his first film, Luces de Buenos Aires (Light of Buenos Aires, 1931). The Museo hoards memorabilia, but doesn’t venture into his obscure inner life, his underworld links, his tendency to

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Carlos Gardel with Mona Maris in the movie Cuesta abajo (1934).

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The Abasto shopping mall.

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corpulency or his ambiguous sexuality. Was he gay? Did he really have a bullet lodged in him after a street fracas? There are enough enigmas about Gardel to keep him alive. After the Museo visit, we ate in the traditional porteño cantina from the 1930s, La Viña del Abasto, with its huge portions, on San Luis, 3007, corner of Juan Jaurés (recognized by the Museo de la Ciudad). Avenida Corrientes, from the Obelisco to the Avenida Callao, reeks of tango. Gardel said: ‘I am a citizen of the calle Corrientes.’ Gardel grew up with tango as it emerged from brothels in an immigrant city overcrowded with single males, who would dance together while waiting for their whores. Tango was the baile macho, a pimp’s dance. Its name is onomatopoeic, the sound of a drum in an ex-slave dance that arrived from Cuba. Enrique Santos Discépolo (1901–1951), tango’s greatest lyricist, aptly defined it as stylized copulation. He also rightly asserted that the main character of his tangos was Buenos Aires itself and pinned it down as ‘a sad thought that can be danced’. The nostalgic music of guitar and bandoneón (an accordion originating in Hamburg) conveys immigrant despair; its great themes being the loss of roots and betrayal by untrustworthy women. It was seen as lascivious and dangerous, with its underworld allusions, but this early brothel tango had moved to dancehalls by 1925. Today tango has become a balletic tango-for-export, a tourist lure, but many milongas recall the sordid past. My favourite dance hall is the decadent Confitería Ideal on Suipacha, 384, with its Doric columns. It offers tango classes upstairs. The odd point about tango today is how it posits a utopia where physical shape or size, age, class or gender seem hardly to matter, though it is the mute male who has to lead through the stiff embraces. Listening to current singers is exciting. When I first heard Edmundo rivero in San Telmo, his voice and the atmosphere coaxed me back to that early, disturbing past. He was in his 80s, dressed in black with dyed hair and really a tango-talker in the sense that he talked rather than sang tangos. I found attempts to marry tango with jazz thrilling. Bandoneón player Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992) studied with composer Alberto Ginastera and then incorporated

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jazz to forge his Tango nuevo. In a small club, we heard Amelita Baltar sing and act the moving ‘Balada para un loco’ (Ballad for a Madman, with words by the poet Horacio Ferrer), with Piazzolla backing her, a historic moment for the new tango. Piazzolla Tango on Florida, 15, in the grand Galería Güemes, is associated with the Piazzolla and is a good place to watch his kind of tango. Tango for tourists to watch can be found at Che Tango, Pinzón 0 (from 8 p.m. onwards) or Señor Tango on Avenida Vieytes, 155 (from 10 p.m.) and is danced outdoors in the pedestrian street market of Caminito in La Boca in a bend of the river called Vuelta de rocha, overlooking the smelly riachuelo. Created in 1959, it has, over the weekends, become a colourful tango corner. This street was once a rail siding, and is named after a famous tango from 192 by Juan de Dios Filiberto. La Boca, a deep port from 1870, still floods, so some of the

Tango dancing in the Confitería Ideal.

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La Esquina de Aníbal Troilo restaurant.

pavements are raised; the riachuelo is now clean of rusting wrecks (some 57 have been lifted out), but it’s still highly contaminated. In a city addicted to psychoanalysis, you can even take tango therapy classes. Tango memories dot the whole city. For example, there’s a pizzería dedicated to Aníbal Troilo (1914–1975) – ‘Pichuco is no more’ – on the corner of Paraguay and Paraná. He was tango’s most famous bandoneón player. His casa natal is on Cabrera, 2937. not all tango music was played by political reactionaries like Gardel. The politicized Homero Manzi (1907–1951), ‘doctor in tangology’, imprisoned in 1931 after the coup, played with Troilo and wrote famous tangos like ‘Malena’ and ‘El sur’. He is associated via plaques with the junction of Avenida Boedo and San Juan and what was then the café El Aeroplano and, since 1981, Esquina Homero Manzi, just by the Boedo subte stop on line E. He lived on Garay, 3251, where he wrote most of his 500-odd tangos. Boedo is also a collective term for a workingclass artistic and literary movement of the 1920s and ’30s. But for me the site outside the Abasto that epitomizes later tango glamour is the grand Palais de Glace in recoleta on Posadas, 1725. It was designed as an ice-skating rink in 1910 for the

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Tango al fresco, near the Basílica del Pilar, recoleta.

Centenary festival and hence is circular; it became a famous tango cabaret in 1915 when a wooden dance floor was added. That same year, Gardel, celebrating his birthday with two friends, was shot in the thorax in an obscure scuffle nearby on Avenida Alvear. The bullet remained lodged inside him. The man who pulled the trigger was Che Guevara’s uncle. Alejandro Bustillo redesigned this mansarded ‘Palace’ in 1931 as the exhibition space it is today. You could take that date as the end of the original tango fad.

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La Bombonera, Boca Juniors and Football

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J

osé Viñals, a poet friend, once took me to a Superclásico, a major-event match between the Boca and river Plate teams. I’d been warned that going to such a football match could be dangerous, but as I lived near the Chelsea football pitch in London in the 190s, I was used to the Shed (the standing-room section for hardcore fans) and its gangs. We took a crowded colectivo down Almirante Brown and shuffled in with the crowds, ages before the game, as I was to be initiated into the racist, homophobic songs, white streamers and fire crackers. By the time the game began, the pitch was wrapped up with countless rolls of toilet paper. The stamping, jumping in unison, yelling and pistol shots were deafening. I could hardly make out the words and the game seemed irrelevant. But the stadium, painted in Boca Juniors colours of blue and yellow, was stunning. Boca Juniors was founded as a club in 1905; their blue-and-yellow shirt colours stem from the Swedish flag, taken from ships in the nearby riachuelo docks. Their horseshoe-shaped stadium is named ‘La Bombonera’, which means sweet/chocolate box, because of its high, squashed stands, and holds 5,000 ululating spectators. It was built in 1940 on Brandsen and Del Valle Iberlucea in the dockside working-class area of La Boca (which means ‘mouth’), on land bought in 1923. Its architect was Slovenian Viktor Sulčič (1895–1973), who also designed the Abasto market. The team are sometimes known as xeneizes, denizens of Genoa. So strong was local Italian feeling that in 1882 striking workers declared La Boca an independent republic. This immigrant origin helps us understand the deep loyalties of the fans for the club. The club has a museum called Museo de la Pasión

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The Bombonera football stadium.

Boquense on Brandsen, 805. Its most famous player was the left-footed Diego Maradona (‘El Pelusa’, The Hairy One) – in Jimmy Burns’s words ‘the most naturally talented player ever’ – who joined in 1981. Famous today are Carlos Tévez (from the Fuerte Apache slum), Juan román riquelme and Martín Palermo. They were champions in 1919, 1920, 1923 and 1924 and famously toured Europe in 1925. Along the outer walls on Valle Iberlucea are murals by the La Boca-based painter rómulo Macció (b. 1931), who lived in Spain and London but chose La Boca for his studio. Sitting high up on one of the stadium’s edges was a giddying experience and acoustically increased the din because the stadium had to be squashed into a small space. Mauricio Macri, still the city’s ‘mayor’ (Chief of Government of the City of Buenos Aires), was also president of La Boca football club from 1995 to 2007, when they won eighteen major titles. Boca were champions again in 2012.

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rómulo Macció’s mural on the side of La Bombonera stadium.

Even for those visitors not keen on football, the eye-catching Boca Juniors club is worth seeing. As you ride a colectivo down Avenida Almirante Brown, get off at the landmark of the Torre del Fantasma, designed by Guillermo Alvarez for a rich landowner in 1910 in the Catalan modernist style. The story goes that a painter called Clementina threw herself from an upper window because the tower was cursed (but no source gives her surname). Then turn right down Brandsen to the dominating stadium. You can eat well in nearby family-run Il Matterello (which means rolling pin in Italian) on Martín rodríguez, 517, or in Bodegón El Obrero at Caffarena 4, with photos of Maradona on its walls, also family-run since 1910 – a parrilla (grilled meat restaurant) visited by foreign celebs. After sizing up the stadium, you will have time to stroll down to El Caminito (see p. 13) and visit the local Museo de Bellas Artes on Avenida Don Pedro de Mendoza, 1843. It was artist Benito Quinquela Martín’s (1890– 1977) studio, where he created expressionist works about this once-thriving dockside area. Straddling the riachuelo is one of the city’s most peculiar historical monuments, often painted by Quinquela Martín. This is the iron-grid railway bridge, Puente Transbordador, built in 1914, that rose 43 m to let ships past underneath; it was in use until 190 and is a national Historical Monument. A new art space, the usina de Arte, has opened in an abandoned electricity substation on Mendoza and Galdós, by the flyover, built as a medieval castle in 1912 for the La Italo company. Working-class La Boca also sent the city’s (and Latin America’s) first socialist to Congress, Alfredo Palacios.

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LA BOMBOnErA, BOCA JunIOrS AnD FOOTBALL

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Football was brought to Argentina by English rail workers and sailors. Thomas Hogg founded Buenos Aires Football club in 187. Alexander Watson Hutton (1853–193) founded the first league in 1893, where the amateur players spoke English. The centenary of this was celebrated in 1993 with a huge, glistening football on a black plinth on Viamonte and Plaza Lavalle, a replica of the ‘tango’ ball used in the 1978 World Cup. Soon locals took football over and the nine great professional clubs came to carve the city up into barrios of warring fans. The clubs include racing Club de Avellaneda (founded 1903), the ‘Academia’ or Club Atlético Independiente (1905), also known as Los Diablos rojos (red Devils), San Lorenzo, or El Ciclón (The Cyclone) in 1908 and river Plate, set up in 1901 by Mr Jacobs, sub-manager of Carbonera Wilson, a company selling coal to the trains. The champions in 2011, Vélez Sarsfield, were founded in 1910. In 1912 the Argentine Association of Football was created and the game became professional in

Puente Transbordador, over the riachuelo, built in 1914.

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1931. up until 19 five city teams won all the prizes. From the start, football developed in working-class areas near the riachuelo. Buenos Aires is marked by the huge football stadiums visible as you fly in, and fans divide the city into zones. You are defined by your club. What team you support is often asked or publicized; even Pope Francis I supports a team (see p. 153). It’s not a game, said essayist Martínez Estrada, but a religious ceremony, an ancient spectacle where fans await their ‘brutal purification’. Stadiums are cathedrals. Games bonded immigrants together in the clan of their team and barrio, with team shirts and songs. And, like everywhere, the local hinchas – football fans – have turned into gangs. All the stadiums have nicknames, like the Bombonera. The first concrete stadium in South America was built for Independiente in 1928, known as ‘La Doble Visera’ (The Double Visor). San Lorenzo’s stadium on Avenida La Plata in Boedo is known as ‘El Viejo Gasómetro’ (The Old Gasometer). river’s huge ‘Monumental’ stadium (holds 70,000) at Avenida Figueroa Alcorta 7597 in núñez, where Argentina won the World Cup in 1978 during the last military dictatorship, was opened in 1938. river, known as the ‘millionaires’, were the first to pay high prices for players and move out of a working-class area. Huracán, founded in 1918, built their stadium on Amancio Alcorta and Colonia; it’s called the ‘Globo’ (meaning ‘balloon’, after national hero Jorge newbery, who died in his attempt to fly over the Andes in a balloon; he also gave his name to the city airport). Globo’s art deco facade was designed by Tomás A. Ducó in 1947 – it is also known as ‘El Palacio Ducó’, with room for 49,000. Another nickname for Huracán is ‘Quemeros’ as it stood near to where the city’s rubbish was burned (quema de basura, burning of rubbish). The San Lorenzo de Almagro team, from Boedo, is famous for shirts similar to Barcelona’s. racing Club’s huge stadium in Avellaneda, constructed in 1950, is called ‘El Cilindro’ (The Cylinder) and holds 110,000. There’s a special edge to games between Argentina and England, from Maradona’s hand-flicked goal – ‘La mano de Dios’, ‘the hand of God’ – in the 198 World Cup back to Captain

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Football in the streets.

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Antonio rattín’s sending off in 19 and being called an ‘animal’ by England coach Alf ramsey (who, though England won, refused to let his team swap shirts). Football, national identity and politics are deeply mixed up. For example, nobody wanted to receive the World Cup from dictator Videla in writer Osvaldo Soriano’s ‘lie of a victory’. Football and the Malvinas/Falklands are still bound up. But what sums up football passion in the city is the long, drawn-out cry of ‘Gol!’ heard on the radio or TV when a goal is scored.

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A packed Monumental stadium.

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Jorge Luis Borges, 1949.

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On the Trail of Jorge Luis Borges

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J

orge Luis Borges, Argentina’s most famous writer, was a porteño. He was born at Tucumán 840 on 24 August 1899, where there’s a plaque. The writer’s teacher/lawyer father Jorge Borges was half English (thanks to his English-born mother); his mother Leonor Acevedo was from a patrician criollo family. However, J. L.’s earliest memories are of another house: a two-floored one with a fenced-in garden, a palm tree and grapevines, in Palermo, then an immigrant area at the northern edge of Buenos Aires. He lived with his parents and sister norah, later a painter, at Serrano 2135 and 2147 until the family left for a seven-year trip to Geneva and Spain in 1914. There’s a plaque, but the houses were demolished and the street was renamed Borges in 1995. The Palermo of the end of the nineteenth century, with its underworld thugs, caught Borges’s imagination. His best evocation of Palermo is his quirky biography of the minor poet of Palermo, Evaristo Carriego (1930). Carriego’s house at Honduras 3748 can be visited as a centre for poetry. So, not much to see, as Carriego’s Palermo is locked inside his writings, though El Preferido, a traditional bar and almacén (store) created in 1885 and run by the same family on Guatemala and Borges, is mentioned by Borges in a poem. I live near the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges at Anchorena 10, which houses the Museo Borges. It was established by his widow María Kodama in 1988, with his personal library, a replica of his tiny bedroom upstairs (he loved lying on his back to read) and, downstairs, glass cases with memorabilia, letters, photographs, books and so on. next door, on Anchorena, 172, Borges had lived with his mother

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from 1938 to 1943, following his father’s death in 1938 and there, as a plaque records, wrote The Circular Ruins, one of his best fictions, in 1940. It was from here that he travelled every day to his modest librarian’s post at the Biblioteca Miguel Cané on Carlos Calvo, a long tram ride to Almagro, a working-class district where he wrote most of his ‘fictions’ of the 1940s. This mini-zone in the Barrio norte was part of Borges’s city beat. relating to an earlier period, a plaque close by on Avenida Pueyrredón, at number 2190 (near its junction with Avenida Las Heras), states that Borges lived there from 1929 to 1938, above a bar called El Blasón (now a shop). Before his time, the city ended here with the Corrales del norte, a slaughter yard in a slum known as Tierra del Fuego. The other zone that Borges trod, for he was a great walker while still sighted, was the smarter Avenida Quintana 222, where he once lived with his family from 1924 to 1929, with its plaque citing a line from a poem. They moved to live at 23 in the same avenue from 1942 to 1944. But where Borges, blind from 1955, lived longest, still with his mother, his cat Beppo and his maid Fanny, was at Maipú 994, B, which gave a narrow view of the trees of his favourite Plaza San Martín. He lived here alone with his mother from 1944 until she died aged 99 in 1975. Opposite this flat, at Maipú 971, is an entrance to the Galería del Este arcade, with its indoor bookshop the Librería La Ciudad, which Borges regularly visited. Outside is a panel outlining Borges’s Buenos Aires. Borges was brought up speaking English with his grandmother and father, but apart from two poems in English, chose Spanish as his literary outlet. He loved ‘the music of English’ and lived in an area with English associations, like the nearby Harrods on Florida or the recently closed Confitería richmond at Florida 48, designed by Jules Dormal in 1917 with boiserie panelling, bronze chandeliers and English hunting prints, where Borges sometimes held his classes on Anglo-Saxon and nordic literature. Borges was demoted by Perón from being a librarian to becoming an inspector of poultry and so resigned in 194 and took up public lecturing to earn money. Then, after Perón’s fall in 1955, he was appointed, though blind, to head the

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norah Borges’s letter-map, 1927.

Biblioteca nacional on México, 54. He walked down Florida to work, and was easily recognized. He succeeded Hugo Wast (real name Gustavo Martínez Zubiría), an anti-Semitic bestselling writer picked by Perón. The Biblioteca nacional was designed by Italian-born architect Carlos Morra in 1901 as the home of the national Lottery (almost a Borgesian joke) and had been directed by writers like French-born Paul Groussac (strangely, also blind) before Borges took over in 1955. I have researched in this now-closed national Library, which retains a Borges aura. He loved libraries, yet his story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941) is a claustrophobic nightmare of living in one. Another place associated with Borges is Xul Solar’s (1887–193) studio, now the Museo Xul Solar, at Laprida 1214. Xul was in Borges’s words the person with the richest, most unpredictable, most heterogeneous and ceaseless imagination that he had ever known, and you can confirm this in the museum. Two other buildings attest to Borges’s habits of dining out and talking; they are the homes of his close, rich writer friends Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo. Bioy kept a bitchy diary of their nightly chats, published after

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Bioy’s death. But despite writing poems about the recoleta, Borges, ill, decided to die in Geneva in 198, where he is also buried. Borges’s Buenos Aires is epitomized in the title of his first book of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires (The Fervour of Buenos Aires, 1923), written after seven years abroad, mainly in Geneva. He has titled many poems ‘Buenos Aires’; his preferred city is a quiet, provincial, even colonial one of low houses and wide skies in the barrios, at odds with the grandiloquent Paris-style city. I can still sense his unglamorous city when I stroll Villa Pueyrredón or Villa Ortúzar. Borges would walk for hours to areas like La Paternal and the Puente Alsina, far off the tourist trail. He loved the city’s ‘involuntary beauties’. In an essay of 19, Borges wondered what he should show a tourist. Palermo Park? no, that’s like a park in any other big city. La Boca? Yes, it’s a ‘foreigner’s barrio’, even for porteños like himself. The Barrio Sur? Maybe. But the rest of the city is monotonous: a street in Saavedra is no different to one in Barracas. So for him Buenos Aires is an invisible, secret city, best experienced in the passionate, nostalgic music and words of tangos that chronicle, he wrote, the city’s comédie humaine (alluding to Balzac’s Paris). In a famous poem called ‘Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires’, he reallocated the spot where Buenos Aires was founded from the riachuelo and La Boca to Palermo, naming Serrano street (now Borges) where he once lived as the foundation stone of his imagined city.

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The Greening City

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B

uenos Aires has become greener and greener, with more trees lining streets and new green spaces. A recent survey found 300 species and 424,35 city trees. There are many railed-in plazas as well as larger parks. The most surprising city lung is the Parque natural y Zona de reserva Ecológica, a large accidental wetlands park made up of dumped rubble and mud and plants washed ashore by the Paraná river. The best entrance is along the continuation of Avenida Córdoba, C. Grierson, over the lock and into Avenida Intendente noel. Before the coast silted up, on the promenade called the Costanera Sur stood the Municipal Balneario (bathing site), until swimming was banned because the river was too contaminated. Designed in 1918 by Benito Carrasco, it was completed in 1925. It was famous for its German bar, the Cervecería Munich, designed in 1927 by Hungarian-born Andrés Kálnay (1893–1981), who built some 120 buildings in the city. Today the stained-glassed Munich is a centre for museums of the city. It’s odd walking along the old Costanera Sur (built in 191), under shady, yellow-flowering tipas, as it no longer looks out to the wide river, but to the ecological park. This is where Lola Mora’s sculpture Fuente de las Nereidas (Fountain of the Nereids, 1903), with its naked Venus that so scandalized porteños, finally ended up. The 350-hectare Ecological reserve, open between 8 a.m. and  p.m., has two large lagoons, many native trees like the ceibo with its red flowers (the national tree), reeds, much pampas grass and bird-watching facilities – 148 bird species have been recorded there. I love looking on to the crashing waves on the rubble beach of the chocolate-coloured riversea. Just to see the widest river in the world jolts you into an

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The Parque natural y Zona de reserva Ecológica.

awareness of how Buenos Aires has blocked its river, so that essayist Alberto Salas is right to say that ‘every day the river is more distant from the city’. Then I spin round and look westwards to the skyscraper skyline of Puerto Madero that encapsulates the city’s history from its riverine origin to its skyscrapers. I’ve had a few scares, with wild dogs and gangs of youths, walking along the park’s riverfront. So I would recommend a stroll or bike ride on weekends, when porteños flock there. You’ll see countless butterflies, turtles, herons, swans and insects. You should bring a sun hat. nearly every trip, I return to Parque Lezama, which may be the site at which Pedro de Mendoza first landed (and hence the monument to him). It’s a promontory that once overlooked the river and now the busy main Avenida Almirante Brown into La Boca. An American, Charles Horne, first landscaped this plot and built a house, with a mirador. In 1857, landowner José Gregorio Lezama bought and improved the house and imported tall araucaria and palms. His house is now the Museo Histórico nacional. The city bought the park, built an amphitheatre in 1914 and pulled down the railings in 1931, making it very popular. On the northern side is the russian Orthodox Catedral de la Santísima Trinidad, built between 1898 and 1901 (directed

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by architect Alejandro Christophersen), with its five cupolas (Christ and four disciples) and portraits inside of the assassinated last tsar, nicholas II, and his wife. After strolling about I drop into the scruffy Bar Británico (where Ernesto Sabato wrote drafts of his Buenos Aires novel, Sobre héroes y tumbas, 191), which opened in 1928 on Defensa. Carlos or Charles Thays (1849–1934) is one of my Buenos Aires heroes, and the city’s small botanical garden is named after its French-born founder. It was really Thays, a botanist and landscape architect, who turned Buenos Aires green, often working until four in the morning but never getting rich, and ridding the city of its arid Spanish plazas. In a large panoramic view engraved by Eduardo Kretschmar in 1838, the sole tree is in a monastery’s cloister; there are no public trees. Thays arrived in Buenos Aires in 1889 and redesigned tyrant rosas’s garden into the Tres de Febrero park; he researched into his adopted country’s botany, travelled all over locating native species and set up home in the crenellated house built in 1881 in the middle of the Jardín Botánico. The house still stands. As Director de Parques y Paseos (parks and walks), employed by the first mayor, Torcuato de Alvear, he planted over 100,000 trees in avenues, parks and plazas, from the Barrancas de Belgrano to Plaza Castelli, Plaza Francia and Parque Lezama. He also designed, in 1912, the curved streets and trees of Barrio Parque, with its ambassadorial residences in eclectic styles. To stroll this labyrinth in spring under the flowering lapachos is to be in a different city. The botanical garden, with its ancient greenhouses (usually locked), was opened in 1898. It covers 7.5 hectares and has over 5,000 species of tree and shrub, from the ‘weed’, hollow inside, called the ombú (which should have been the national tree as it is the only one that grew on the treeless pampas) to the exotic palo borracho (drunken stick, because of its bottleshaped trunk), the beautiful blue-flowering jacaranda, the quebrachos (meaning axe-breaker and used as railway sleepers all over the uK) and the tall, black-trunked tipas. This botanical garden is shady, packed with cats and porteños quietly reading or chatting on benches by statues, including one of Thays by

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Aerial view of Barrio Parque.

Albert Lagos from 194. The garden stands by one of the most toxic roundabouts in the city, Plaza Italia, with Garibaldi on his bronze horse. Thays landscaped rosas’s Palermo grounds into a 37hectare park off the baroque Monumento de los Españoles and by rodin’s statue of Sarmiento. Parts of it were swampy; the Maldonado stream that ran through was buried in a pipe in 1928 (below Avenida Juan B. Justo, named after the doctor who founded the Socialist Party). The park’s name is derived from Juan Domínguez Palermo, who married in Buenos Aires in 1590, inheriting the land. He was from Sicily, then part of the kingdom of Aragon. As parks are scarce in Buenos Aires it’s very popular on Sundays for family picnics, football games, rollerbladers, horse-pulled sightseeing carriage rides and so on. It’s a bustling place to watch the porteños at rest. There is a lovely rose garden, a boating lake, a pond named after Victoria Ocampo, a poets’ avenue with busts of Borges, Alfonsina Storni, Antonio Machado, García Lorca and many others and a well-kept Japanese garden on Avenida rodolfo Berro where you pay to wander around ponds with huge carp and encounter a pleasingly shaped boulder dedicated to the ‘sweat of Japanese immigrants’. This tree-and-grass park is known as

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Greenhouse in the Jardín Botánico Carlos Thays.

The rose garden in Palermo Park.

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‘Los Bosques de Palermo’ (Palermo Woods), echoing Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. After a week in the noisy, canyon-like streets of the city centre, you long for trees and grass. But if you need to escape the expanding city, there are two nature reserves just outside city limits. One is the strategic island Martín García, a nature reserve of 180 hectares – increasing in size every year thanks to river mud – some 37.5 km from the Tigre river station and the other is a Parque Ecológico named after the Argentina-born English writer W. H. Hudson (1841–1922), in Florencia Varela, a southern suburb.

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The Labyrinth of the Recoleta Cemetery

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very time I try to find my wife’s family mausoleum in the recoleta cemetery I get lost. I wander the narrow streets of this miniature city of ostentatious tombs with trees, countless cats and a faint stench. Most tourists seek out Evita’s mausoleum. Finally, I stand outside Cipriano Quesada’s locked vault, my wife’s family mausoleum, which stands two storeys high with tall windows and a vaguely sixteenth-century Spanish aspect. The city charges taxes that have to be paid. To sell the mausoleum would mean clearing out rotting family coffins going down three floors and leaving them in a paupers’ grave. Few have been inside in decades. What’s odd about this cemetery is that nobody is buried; all the corpses are stacked in coffins. right in the middle of this fashionable city zone is a necropolis that is about prestige and earthly power. It’s also a compendium of Buenos Aires’s history and an anthology of architectural history from roman temple style to art nouveau stained glass. President rivadavia ousted the Franciscan monks of the recoletos order from their monastery outside the city to create the Cementerio del norte on 17 november 1822. The first person buried there was María de los Dolores Maciel, in 1822, and the gravedigger (early burials were into the earth) was an anonymous Englishman. Slowly the city encroached on the cemetery. By 1949 this now inner-city cemetery became the recoleta, which is the name also for the barrio. Juan Buschiazzo had designed the vast Doric-columned entrance, walled in the cemetery and then paved it in 1881, and it has retained the same look since then. There are some 5,000 vaults and no room for expansion. In fact, a second and far larger cemetery, the

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Chacarita, was built to cater for overflow. A rough rule of thumb at the recoleta cemetery is that the simplest ones are the oldest, as befits the early, modest colonial families. However, successive economic booms ensured that the tombs reflected the richest families. nevertheless, by far the most visited recoleta tomb is Eva Perón’s final resting place in a crypt of the Familia Duarte mausoleum, under steel beams and bulletproof doors. You cannot take too many precautions as Perón’s tomb in the Chacarita was broken into and one of his hands stolen. The Duarte vault is covered in plaques and flowers tied to the railings. But you cannot get inside, let alone contemplate the final fate of Evita’s embalmed body. Just to stand there is to recall her extraordinary posthumous journeys. I always wonder: what was the point of embalming her if you cannot see her today? Despite populist Evita, who hated the Barrio norte families, this is the posh cemetery, its narrow streets an Argentine Who’s Who. You need to know the family names on the tombs to grasp the history. For example, the first sculpture installed there was Antonio Tantardini’s Dolorosa, above Facundo Quiroga’s tomb. He was the loyal ally to dictator rosas whose assassination changed Argentine history. Quiroga was placed standing up. Gossip claims that the face of the Dolorosa statue is that of Quiroga’s wife (see pp. 81–2). Most of the country’s presidents, heroes, scientists and writers are decaying here. Look at the Alvear tomb, designed by Alejandro Christophersen in 1905, where Marcelo T., regina and Don Torcuato lie. The statue of the boxer Luis Angel Firpo, with dressing gown and hairy chest, is there. Above President Sarmiento’s vault is a huge, bronze condor designed by Sarmiento himself. In 1989 President Menem brought rosas’s body back from England to rest in the recoleta, another tomb bearing wilting flowers from his supporters. Another irony is that the quasi-national poet Leopoldo Lugones, in his suicide note, stipulated that his corpse must not go to the recoleta, but it did, under another name (the Berystein tomb). Eva Perón’s final resting place, the Familia Duarte mausoleum in recoleta.

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Some have complained that the mausoleum’s faint stench is dangerous to the city’s health, but any plans to demolish what the city chronicler Florencio Escardó called a ‘cyst’ in the city would fail as it is a major tourist attraction, with some 2,000 visits a day. I’m not the first to feel that wandering this city-within-a-city is like getting lost in a maze, or a Borgesian labyrinth. V. S. naipaul, when he visited the city in 1972, noted erroneously that brothels backed on to the recoleta, but these are in fact albergues transitorios (transitory lodgings) or telos where lovers pay to tryst by the hour as they overlook the cemetery. The recoleta has more sinister memories. Its high walls have seen assassinations during rosas’s tyranny and later victims of the Triple A death squads. On Sundays there is a lively arts and crafts fair and opposite the entrance gate, by huge gomero trees (in fact, ficus benalensis brought from Australia in 1878), are the fashionable tourist restaurants and the café La Biela. You can sit outside and stare at the living.

rufina Cambaceres’s art nouveau tomb, 1902.

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La Dolorosa at Facundo Quiroga’s tomb by Antonio Tantardini, in the recoleta cemetery.

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The Fin de Siècle City: From Plaza de Mayo to Congreso

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P

arts of Buenos Aires were rebuilt to suit its new image as the Paris of South America. The best way to see this change from a Spanish colonial backwater to a Paris-mimicking city is along the Avenida de Mayo, carved in 1894 in a straight line from the Casa rosada to the Congreso Palace. Behind the city’s old fort, knocked down and rebuilt as the Casa rosada, is the symbolic Plaza Colón, built on land reclaimed from the river. There stood the Carrara-marble statue of Genoan Christopher Columbus (Colón in Spanish), pointing back to Europe. Designed by Italian Arnoldo Zocchi, it was erected in 1921 and was damaged by the bombing of the Casa rosada in June 1955. Pointing to Europe, from where most Argentines originated, it continues a tradition of making comparisons with Europe that characterized Argentine culture for over 150 years. The statue is lying on its side, ready to be moved to Mar de Plata and be replaced with another symbolic figure, the female guerrilla fighter Juana Azurduy (1780–182), who fought the Spanish royalists in Alto Perú, today’s Bolivia, and died poor. Juana Azurduy suggests an Argentine identity swerve away from Europe and towards Latin America. To view the Plaza de Mayo as mutating history, you have to imagine how it was when it was two plazas divided by the recova with twelve arches, market and fort. Today, as you stand on this historic plaza, the Casa rosada glares at you. It’s even better illuminated at night. In your mind’s eye, Evita harangues the Peronist crowds from a balcony. Her shrill voice still incites angry passions. The Plaza de Mayo is a cockpit of citizens’ demonstrations and popular democracy, from the outcry for independence from Spain in May 1810 (hence its name) to the

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bombing of Perón in 1955; from the burning down of the Curia to the Pirámide in its centre where the gaucho montoneros of ramírez tied up their horses in 1820 and where the Madres circled every Thursday during the last dictatorship and the abuelas still do. This is the site of national pride; a very recent crowding of the plaza was when Argentine-born Francisco I was elected as pope, in 2013. Further signs of Argentine history in and around this plaza include the equestrian statue of liberator Manuel Belgrano, creator of the blue-and-white national flag, plus, facing the Casa rosada, on the 25 de Mayo and rivadavia, once stood El Gran Hotel Argentino. This was where an overweight José Hernández (1834–188) wrote the narrative poem that evokes the rebellious gaucho as the model of Argentine identity, El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872). The Casa rosada has a newly refurbished museum of presidents, built on the ruins of Taylor’s 1854 semicircular aduana, which had two floors, a white-tiled tower and a lighthouse. A further historical arena can be found inside the dull Ministerio de Bienestar Social (Ministry of Social Welfare) at Balcarce 139, where the Old Congreso has been preserved by the Academia nacional de Historia. It opened in 184 and closed in 1905. Opposite the Casa rosada is the cabildo, where you can imagine the declaration of independence from Spain of 25 May 1810. The modernizing urge to seem Parisian meant that this colonial cabildo had to be reduced to make room for the Avenida de Mayo cutting through the city in 1894 and then for the Diagonal. Close by this truncated cabildo is the Doriccolumned, neoclassical Metropolitan Cathedral that houses hero San Martín’s corpse in a side chapel. In 1884 E. Herzog, a German traveller, mistook the neoclassical cathedral for the stock exchange. next to the cathedral stood the first opera house, El Colón, built in 1857 and demolished in 1888. As mentioned elsewhere in the guide, nineteenth-century adventurer richard Burton thought this was like the railway station. But there can be no mistaking the 95-m-high clock tower of the Concejo Deliberante, completed in 1931, where Eva’s body lay in mourning. In typical Europeanizing gestures,

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Plaza de Mayo, 1910.

architect Héctor Ayerza imported walnut panelling from Italy, chandeliers from Baccarat and 30 bronze bells from Germany. Perón had an office there in 1951, as did Eva, who worked there from 1947 to 1952 in a room renamed the Salón Eva Perón. The last building attempting Parisian mimicry is the mansarded Palacio Municipal, designed by Juan Buschiazzo in 1914 and recycling an expropriated private house. To walk up the plane-tree-lined Avenida de Mayo is to read in its façades the architectural history of Buenos Aires, wrote critic Blas Matamoro. I would add, of a city avid for European glamour. First stop on my stroll is the grand La Prensa building (designed by Carlos Agote and Alberto de Gainza in 1898), home to the conservative newspaper founded by José Clemente Paz in 189 and functioning in this building from 1898. By 1913, it had the largest circulation in Argentina. Banned by Perón in 1951 as too critical of his regime, it relocated in Montevideo and its former home is now the Casa de la Cultura de la Ciudad. Buenos Aires is a city where you must always look upwards, and there you’ll see the bronze statue of Pallas Athene, nicknamed ‘La Farola’ (by French sculptor Maurice Bouval, 183–1947), crowning this eclectic ‘palace’. It weighs 3,000 kg and has a powerful light in one hand,

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a newspaper in the other and a siren to announce bad news. When the newspaper was banished, this sculpture was taken down – she stood for freedom of speech. It was restored in 1955. The siren first sounded to announce the assassination by an anarchist of umberto I of Italy on 29 July 1900 and sounded loud when Argentina finally broke with the Axis in 1944. Inside, the baroque Salón Dorado has been refurbished and has murals depicting Grecian myths painted by nazareno Orlandi. Borges gave his first lecture here. La Prensa had its own doctors’ surgery, a fabulous library, a meteorological service and so on. next stop up the Avenida de Mayo is the Café London City, at Avenida de Mayo 599; mentioned by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), it dates from 1910. London City sells his books and postcards, but do not enter, for the next café is the city’s most famous, the Tortoni, on 825, an art nouveau jewel with its stained-glass ceiling and veined marble tables, famous for its poets, singers and politicians. In the basement, with its grand piano and La Boca paintings, a group of artists and poets called La Peña would regularly meet in the first half of the twentieth century. Lorca and Luigi Pirandello visited, or locals like Gardel, Alfonsina Storni and Xul Solar. President Marcelo T. de Alvear dropped in from the Casa rosada. The first Tortoni of 1858 moved to its current site in 1892, redesigned by Christophersen. Despite its Italiansounding name, this café was modelled on one from Paris. It keeps a Spanish aura with its thick hot chocolate, fried churros and cider. Chess is played and downstairs are the busts of tango singers and many tributes and plaques. Further up the avenida, Mario Palanti (1885–1979) designed the Hotel Castelar (opened in 1928 as the Hotel Excelsior), at 1152, with its sombre bar, still-functioning Turkish baths and a Lorca museum in his room on the seventh floor, but you need patience to read the history of Buenos Aires in panels on the hallway walls. Also by Mario Palanti is the archetypal building on this European-dreaming avenue, at number 1370: the baroque Palacio Barolo, named after Italian cotton and wool merchant Luis Barolo. One of the city’s great buildings, built between 1919 and 1923 and then the tallest building in the city at 103 m,

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The art nouveau Café Tortoni, Av. de Mayo.

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it offers trips up its baroque tower and a bar on the ground floor. At its apex, it has a swivelling searchlight. Despite housing nine elevators, Barolo had his own, secret one installed. He instructed Palanti to feature Dante in this building, so he divided it into three like the Commedia: Hell had nine vaults/circles; as you rise up past Purgatory you reach Paradise, the 100-m rise

Inside Café Tortoni.

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Palacio Barolo, Av. de Mayo.

equalling the hundred cantos, with the light at the top being the Rosa mistica seen from its sister building in Montevideo. It’s worth the tour to note the details of its interior design. Palanti returned to Mussolini’s Italy. The Avenida de Mayo ends facing the Palacio del Congreso nacional, with its cast of rodin’s The Thinker statue (bought in 1909) and the Kilómetro Cero, a stone, set up in 1935, that established road distances from Buenos Aires. On the right of the Congreso is the defunct art nouveau café Confitería El Molino (c. 191), with its windmill sails. Designed by Francesco Gianotti, it had pink marble columns and gold mirrors and was famed for its thick hot chocolate. It was a hive of political gossip and it is currently being refurbished. The avenue ends with a grotesque baroque monument to Los Dos Congresos, celebrating the centenary of the 1810 May revolution, unveiled in 1914 and consisting of statues and fountains. The grandiose Palacio del Congreso was inaugurated in 190 but not completed until 194, with its 25 grey

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limestone Graeco-roman columns and 85-m-high green dome, visible across the city. I link two moments to this avenue, terminating at the Palacio del Congreso. First, Hipólito Yrigoyen’s 191 election procession from the Congreso to Casa rosada, where his followers uncoupled the horses and dragged his carriage themselves in their ‘explosion of idolatry’, in Ibarguren’s words. The second moment was when the avenue became the venue for bitter fights and arguments during the Spanish Civil War of 193–9, presaging how Argentine society was polarized regarding the Second World War between supporting the Axis and the Allies.

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Gallery City

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F

or the many visitors who do not read or speak Argentine Spanish, a quick way to get a feel for the city is to see its history reflected and recreated in art. Much of Argentine art has been vying with and defying what has been painted abroad, and notably in Europe. Early Argentine collectors returned from Paris with the latest French art and many artists took the trip to Europe to challenge their own provinciality. But from the very beginnings of Argentine independence local artists like Charles Henri Pellegrini and Prilidiano Pueyrredón have faithfully captured the city and painted eminent porteños. Foreigners too recorded the city, from the English sailor Emeric Essex Vidal (1791–181) to the German Johan Moritz rugendas (1802– 1858) and French travellers raymond Monvoisin and Leon Pallière (1790–1820; 1823–1887). But then photography took over this task, so artists had to rethink the realist tradition. The artist, I think, who best blended realism with experimentalism is Antonio Berni, born in 1905 in rosario, Argentina but who died in Buenos Aires in 1981. The place to look at his work is at the strikingly modern Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), on Avenida Figueroa Alcorta, 3415, which houses the Costantini collection of modern Latin American art. It also holds special shows, has a cinema and bookshop, offers many lectures and its café overlooks the Plaza república del Perú. The escalator up reveals the spacious inside, bright with sunlight. renowned Argentine architecture practice AFT won the competition to design it in 1998 from 450 projects. I’m a regular there. Berni combined Surrealism with social realism. He was in Paris from 192 to 1930, befriending Louis Aragon as he split from Breton, and became a communist. When Berni

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Atrium of MALBA, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.

returned to Buenos Aires in 1930 the military ruled, following José Félix uriburu’s coup. The result was his Manifestación (1934), with the faces in the crowd staring out at you, hard and suffering. Here were the immigrants without work or dignity, filtered through Surrealist dreams and a political subconscious. Berni won a prize at the Venice Biennale in 192 for his invention of two characters personified in his paintings. Juanito Laguna is from a villa miseria. Berni uses scraps from rubbish dumps, collage-style, in his realist, experimental and political pictures featuring Laguna. A sex worker called ramona Montiel is his second character, a fake blonde tapping into male fantasies and sexual consumerism. Berni lived in Caballito near Parque Lezica and had his enormous studio on rawson in Almagro, where I was taken by José Viñals in 197 just after he’d published a long interview with Berni, but sadly Berni was out of town. Lino Enea Spilimbergo (189–194) is another porteño artist who stuck to a stylized neorealism and was a close friend

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to Berni. His series of narrative prints with a black background about the prostitute Emma is like a porteño version of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress. But what really strikes me is the fact that the whole museo reaches out to Latin America, not Europe – symptomatic of Argentina’s slow acceptance of its cultural geography, what Borges called its destino sudamericano. You can observe this change of perspective from admiring Europe to evoking Argentina itself by visiting the Museo de Bellas Artes, once the city’s pumping station but transformed into a pinkish Grecian-columned gallery by architect Bustillo and recently reconditioned. The Impressionist works are excellent, but dawdle in the nineteenth-century Argentine collection. noteworthy is the late film director María Luisa Bemberg’s (1922–1995) donation of her collection of small works by Xul Solar and the uruguayan Luis Figari (181–1938). I am always challenged to match Xul’s architectural visions with the actual city. Further museums show realist Argentine art. In Puerto Madero, over the bridge on Dique 4, is the Colección Amalia Lacroze Fortabat on Olga Cossettini, 141, designed by uruguayan rafael Viñoly in 2008 and with a fine nineteenthand twentieth-century Argentine collection in a spacious,

Antonio Berni, Manifestación, 1934.

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Museo de Bellas Artes al Aire Libre ‘Caminito’ (open-air art museum).

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warehouse-type building. Amalia Fortabat made her fortune in cement. The Museo Sívori in Palermo Park, near the rose garden and on Avenida Infanta Isabel, is named after landscape artist Eduardo Sívori (1847–1918) and has a good collection of realist Argentine art. It was originally a model tambo (dairy) with milk cows, for urban park visitors to appreciate where milk comes from. However, La Boca artist Benito Quinquela Martín (1890– 1977) is the best exponent of an expressionist realism that captured the sweat and drudge of his city’s docks. La Boca became a deep-water harbour in 1870. When I first knew the Vuelta de rocha on the riachuelo it was a graveyard of rusting wrecks, but they have all been dragged off. Martín’s studio and home is now the Museo de Bellas Artes de la Boca at Avenida Don Pedro de Mendoza 1835, with his dockside paintings of La Boca of the 1930s and ’40s and a fine rooftop view.

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Bookworm Paradise

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B

uenos Aires was chosen as the World Capital of Books in 2011. right from my first visit in 1970 I was struck by how much porteños read and discussed ideas and books. The second-hand bookshops and stalls have thrived and are eclectic mines, though your fingers get black with grime as you handle the paperbacks. If you read Spanish, Avenida Corrientes between the Obelisco and Avenida Pueyrredón is a bookworm’s paradise. nearly all booksellers enjoy talking and many are writers. new books can be checked out at Gandhi at number 1743, Librería Losada at 1551 and Librería Hernández at 143 and 1311; all these bookshops also have events. Legend has it that the bookshops never close on Avenida Corrientes, and that this busy street never sleeps. But away from Avenida Corrientes, second-hand stalls that I always dip into are located on Parque rivadavia, which I reach by subte station Acoyte on line A. The park was designed by Thays in 1928. More books are for sale in stalls by Tribunales – the law court – on Plaza Lavalle. Casares is an antiquarian bookshop specializing in Argentine topics at Suipacha 521. It is family-run, and the owner Alberto Casares is very knowledgeable. And since 1939 the Librería Fernández Blanco at Tucumán 712 has also specialized in Argentine and Buenos Aires history. Some famous bookshops have vanished. One was Marcos Sastre’s on Victoria, 59, today’s Florida, known from 1833 as Sastre’s Bookshop. By 1835 he had over 1,000 books to lend on subscription. It became a clandestine meeting point for young porteño intellectuals who read out speeches at a salón literario. They debated Argentina’s need for a second political and intellectual independence. Sastre and Alberdi argued that rosas

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was a revolutionary, but Echeverría and Gutiérrez thought that life in the city under his absolutism was worse than under the Spaniards. Sastre renamed his bookshop the Librería Argentina until rosas had it closed in 1838 and the young thinkers escaped into long exile in Montevideo. Except for Sastre, that is, who

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El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookshop on Av. Santa Fe.

admired rosas as the protector of order and peace. In 1970 I would walk every day to Aldo Pellegrini’s bookshop El Dragón on Suipacha and chat. I met countless poets and painters who would drop by the bookshop; coffee was always available, and

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it became a microcosm of the city’s intellectual restlessness. It also has vanished. Another bookshop I still visit, called norte, was run by the late Héctor Yanover, a poet and bookseller who doubled as director of the national Library. He too was good for a mocking chat and the bookstore is still on Avenida Las Heras, 2225, and family-run. El Glyptodón is a curious historical bookshop whose name refers to a fossil shell of a giant armadillo found in Patagonia by its owner and painted as the shop’s sign. The shop was opened by the proletarian, self-taught palaeontologist Florentino Ameghino (1854–1911) on rivadavia, 94, in 1882. Biographer Márquez Miranda called it a dark cupboard. It moved to rivadavia between Pasteur and Azcuénaga and was run by Ameghino’s brother until 1932. Ameghino had cranky ideas about the origin of man, but became director of the science museum, the Museo nacional, in 1902 until his death. There is a second-hand bookshop named El Glyptodón today on Ayacucho, 734. La Librería de Avila, at Adolfo Alsina 500, a block from Plaza de Mayo, is the city’s oldest existing bookshop. It has second-hand and new books on two floors and has existed since 1830, when it was called Librería del Colegio as it’s next to the ex-Jesuit Colegio nacional. In 192 it was knocked down but ‘Librería de Avila’ reopened in 1994 under Miguel Angel Avila on the same site. The most stunning bookshop in the city and in South America is the Ateneo Grand Splendid on Avenida Santa Fe, 180, which opened in 2000. It has been developed out of a theatre, with a café on the stage, chairs and boxes to read in, and books everywhere. I have been to readings, round tables and book launches there. note the fresco on the dome by Italian nazareno Orlandi. And you really can sit and read freely. The building was built in 1903 as the Teatro nacional or norte. In 1919 it was refurbished as the Splendid Theatre, showing films, including the city’s first sound film La divina dama (The Divine Lady) in 1929. The last film shown was in February 2000. The Feria del Libro, in the precinct of La rural off Plaza Italia, celebrated its 39th year in 2013. The Feria has become a vast,

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echoing supermarket for books from all over Latin America. The space lacks intimacy, is populist and can be very crowded. However, whatever my bias, it does capture the porteño passion for literary culture with its high percentage of translations bringing the world into La rural.

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The Museo Larreta and Walled Garden

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I

n such an immigrants’ city as Buenos Aires, I enjoy being reminded of its Hispanic roots. The best place to savour the pull of the madre patria is the wealthy historical novelist Enrique Larreta’s (1873–191) white, walled-in, Andalusian-style home (designed by Martín noel in 191, remodelling an 1880 villa). now called the Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta, it is at Juramento 2291 in Belgrano. It’s closed on Tuesdays and is close to the Juramento subte stop on line D. The house was given as a wedding present by his rich mother-in-law. Enrique Larreta had accumulated a beautiful collection of Spanish religious art, altars, books and furniture while roaming Spain researching his fiction. Among the most stunning pieces is an altar from 1503 that Larreta bought from San nicolás church in Burgos Aranda del Duero, northeastern Spain, in 1912, made before Argentina was ‘discovered’. Outside the museum is just as attractive, thanks to the quiet and shady Moorish-Spanish garden, with a pergola, fountains, ombú, magnolia and palms. Larreta had taste; his estancia ‘Acelain’ near Azul, designed in the Moorish-Spanish style by noel, is one of the grandest in Argentina. Larreta acquired his porteño Andalusian mansion in 191 and settled there in 1920 after his stint as Argentine ambassador in Paris from 1910 to 1919, where he also published a play in French. There he’d witnessed the arrival of tango, shocked that a brothel dance was accepted in high society. He wrote: ‘For Argentine ears, tango music stirs up really disagreeable ideas.’ La gloria de don Ramiro (1908), a historical novel set in Phillip II’s Avila in Spain, was very popular and quickly translated into English and French. You can see Larreta’s writer’s desk,

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Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta.

lectern and pictures in this Belgrano mansion. He was also a professor of medieval history at the Colegio nacional, and a talented painter. He congregated around him a group of nationalistic, Catholic writers like Manuel Gálvez, who caused a scandal with his novel about the white slave trade, or ricardo rojas, who wrote the first history of Argentine literature and whose home, with its very Spanish patio, has just reopened as a museum on Charcas, 2937. no wonder that more freethinking writers like Carlos Mastronardi, Borges and Xul Solar would wander round the white-walled garden and house shouting abuse at Larreta in the 1920s. Larreta was seen as a reactionary through their avant-garde eyes. But what counts for me in this walled-in museo is not literary gossip, much as I enjoy it, but how a passion for things Spanish created an atmosphere in the garden that you can still appreciate. It’s to do with the sound of water from a fountain, a protected patio, birdsong and

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The garden at the Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta.

tree shade – all attributes drowned in noisy, twenty-first-century Buenos Aires. This is not so much a historical museum, but an ahistorical one, where time hardly matters. Larreta was not alone in relishing the Hispanic tradition as a shield against immigrant vulgarity. Architect Martín noel designed another Hispano-Moorish mansion in 1923, which is now the Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Isaac Fernández Blanco at Suipacha 1422, specializing in Spanish colonial art and silver and with a sunken garden and tall trees. A final port

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Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Fernández Blanco.

of call for this Spanish-revival architecture is rogelio Yrurtia’s museum-studio on O’Higgins, 2390, in Belgrano. remodelled by architect Carlos Schmitt in 1921 in a neo-colonial pastiche, it won an award in 1923 for its facade. Of note is the tiled inner patio. Yrurtia left many public sculptures, from the Monument to Work to statues of Dorrego and rivadavia. Work by his painter wife Lía Correa Morales is also on show at the museum. It’s a low, modest studio with a small garden and a lovely facade. This recourse to baroque Hispanic values at the turn of the twentieth century was a reaction against the dominant Italian architecture. Anywhere in the city you can suddenly come across a Hispanic-Moorish building insisting that this city was Spanish in origin.

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San Telmo indoor market, built in 1897.

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HOTELS Marriott Plaza Hotel Florida 1005. www.marriott.com Some traditional Argentine luxury hotels have survived. In the fourth and last edition of the Baedeker for Argentina (1913), the Plaza Hotel is called the most elegant in South America. In the 1967 Guía Peuser, the first on the list is still the Plaza Hotel. It opened in 1909 and is now the Marriott Plaza Hotel on Florida, 1005, looking on to Plaza San Martín. It retains its glory as the first really luxurious hotel in the city, with the Plaza Grill still unmatched for steaks, but best of all is the unaltered art deco bar (see p. 55).

Palacio Duhau / Park Hyatt Av. Alvear 1661. www.buenosaires.park.hyatt.com e Palacio Duhau is a luxurious hotel in the ex-Duhau private palace, with garden, art gallery and restaurant. It’s where you can imagine how wealthy Argentines once lived (see p. 104).

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Four Seasons Hotel Posadas 1086–88. www.fourseasons.com/buenosaires With 138 rooms, it has suites in its Belle Époque mansion and modern rooms in a tower with spa, with great city views. Fidel Castro and Mick Jagger have stayed there.

Hotel Castelar Av. Mayo 1152. www.castelarhotel.com.ar Built in 1929 (architect Mario Palanti) and has Turkish baths. Lorca lived in room 704, which is now a little museum (see p. 191). Its dark, moody bar on the ground floor was declared ‘notable’ by the city.

Art Hotel Azcuénaga 1268. www.arthotel.com.ar Each of its 36 rooms displays art by Argentine artists, and it has an exhibition space downstairs. e hotel is modern inside, discreet and

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quiet, in a Barrio Norte side street. One of many ‘boutique’ hotels in the city.

MUSEUMS Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo Av. del Libertador 1902. www.mnad.org Imposing neoclassical home of the rich Chilean diplomat Matías Errázuriz and Josefina de Alvear, turned into an impressive museum (see p. 106). Guided tours as well as a virtual tour.

Colección de Arte Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat Olga Cossettini 141, Puerto Madero. www.coleccionfortabat.org.ar A permanent show of mainly Argentine art, with a gallery for special shows, in a fine contemporary building designed by Rafael Viñoly in 2008 (see p. 197).

Museo Evita Lafinur 2988. www.museoevita.org

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Shows the everyday life of Evita Duarte; here you can see her clothes, hear her voice and so on. Excellent on-site restaurant (see p. 219).

Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Isaac Fernández Blanco Suipacha 1422. www.museos.buenosaires.gob.ar Located in what’s known as the Palacio Noel, after its original owner and his architect brother who designed it. It houses colonial art, from altarpieces to many religious artefacts and much silver (see p. 208). It has just opened a new room of musical instruments.

MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericana de Buenos Aires) Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3451. www.mnba.org.ar Showing the best contemporary art in town, it specializes in Latin American painters and sculptors and has a floor for special exhibitions (see p. 195). Good bookshop, cinema and restaurant.

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Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Av. del Libertador 1473. www.mnba.org.ar Bustillo’s redesigned pumping house has an excellent collection of Argentine art, as well as one or two pieces from most European artists, so that you can gauge the country’s cultural aspirations (see pp. 107, 197).

Museo Xul Solar Laprida 1214. www.xulsolar.org.ar A museum dedicated to one of Borges’s masters, whose inventions rivalled his own (see pp. 175, 197). He invented his own versions of pianos, chess sets and languages as well as painting his visions.

Museo Casa Carlos Gardel Jean Jaurés 735. www.museos.buenosaires.gob.ar/gardel.htm e tango master’s home, with memorabilia of his short life. You can watch old film footage where he sings tangos and enter into the spirit of his times.

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Museo de la Ciudad Defensa 219. www.museos.buenosaires.gob.ar Delightful museum, which owns several houses on Alsina, 402, 455 and Alsina y Defensa, with ancient photos and domestic objects saved from demolitions, surveying how people lived in the city. Started by architectural historian José María Peña in 1968, now retired (see p. 49).

Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta Av. Juramento 2291, Belgrano. www.museos.buenosaires.gob.ar/larreta.htm Houses a collection specializing in colonial art from Spain (see pp. 206–8). Has a Moorish-Spanish garden and, recently, a confitería.

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SITES Casa Rosada Hipólito Yrigoyen 1420. www.presidencia.gov.ar e Museo del Bicentenario offers a graphic and didactic tour of differing historical periods below the Casa Rosada, in the foundations of what was Taylor’s aduana and the old fort. Also on display there is the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural, made while in Buenos Aires.

Plaza Lavalle Bordered by Viamonte, Talcahuano, Libertad and Lavalle Here you can see the Teatro Colón opera house, the law courts known as Tribunales, a synagogue and a Museo Judío (Jewish Museum, exploring the history of Jews in Argentinia; the Museo del Holocausto is also nearby, on Montevideo, 919). On another corner is the baroque Teatro Cervantes (see p. 217). Standing at the foot of the column with Lavalle on top, you get a quick grasp of the city’s history (see p. 142).

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Plaza San Martín Northern end of Florida, Maipú, Av. Santa Fe, Libertador and Leandro Alem e Plaza displays the liberator San Martín’s statue and is bordered by grand, ex-private homes like the visitable Palacio Paz, the Palacio San Martín and the iconic Edificio Kavanagh. It has old trees and benches and at its foot a ‘Monument to the Fallen in the Malvinas’. It looks on to reclaimed land and the railway station of Retiro, the Torre de los Ingleses and the Sheraton Hotel (see pp. 54–7).

El Obelisco Intersection of Av. Corrientes and Av. 9 de Julio Erected to commemorate 400 years since Mendoza’s founding of the city. On each side of the obelisk there are inscriptions concerning Mendoza, Garay, the Federal Capital and the raising of the national flag (see pp. 125–6).

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Recoleta Cemetery Junín 1760. www.cementeriorecoleta.co.ar Along with the Pilar Church, the Centro Recoleta, the large gomero trees, bars, restaurants, mall and shops, this is an epicentre for tourism and the best place to savour the city’s bustle (see pp. 183–7).

Jardín Botánico Carlos Thays Av. Santa Fe 3951, near Plaza Italia and Garibaldi’s equestrian statue. www.buenosaires.gob.ar The botanical garden is a green island surrounded by noisy traffic (see pp. 179–81).

Plazoleta Cortázar Honduras and Serrano e epicentre of Palermo Viejo’s feria, restaurants and shops. From this roundabout you can stroll the streets, buzzing with life on weekends.

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Puerto Madero www.puertomadero.com Visit the modernistic cityscape, converted docks and warehouses, the Catholic University, the Sarmiento sailing ship, the Fortabat Art Collection and the Faena Arts Center. The vista of the docks is striking; Puerto Madero has become a new barrio, nicknamed ‘The Island’.

La Boca and the Vuelta de Rocha Av. Don Pedro de Mendoza Visit these along with El Caminito for tangos, Fundación proa, an exhibition space for modern art at Av. Don Pedro de Mendoza 1929, and Benito Quinquela Martín’s studio museum looking on to the tidied-up but still smelly Riachuelo (see pp. 164–7).

Parque Lezama Bounded by Av. Brasil, Av. Martín García, Av. Paseo Colón and Defensa With the Museo Histórico Nacional (entry on Defensa) and the Russian Orthodox Church, it’s a good vantage point to look over reclaimed land and get a sense of the city’s relationship with the river.

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ENTERTAINMENT VENUES Teatro Colón Cerrito 628, tickets at Tucumán 1171. www.teatrocolon.org.ar Best in Buenos Aires for ballet, opera and classical music. e setting is luxurious and the guided tour of the restored building is a must. It’s the home of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic orchestra, while the Colón Contemporáneo schedules the theatre’s contemporary music events.

El Viejo Almacén Av. Independencia 300, corner of Balcarce. www.viejo-almacea.com.ar e most traditional tango place in Buenos Aires, where Edmundo Rivero started in 1968 (see p. 160).

Teatro San Martín Av. Corrientes 1530–50. www.complejoteatral.gob.ar A cheaply built but attractive modern building from the 1960s. Especially good for subsidized, underground theatre and cinema.

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Teatro Nacional Cervantes Av. Córdoba 1155. www.teatrocervantes.gov.ar Opened in 1921, the theatre is in Spanish Plateresque style and was commissioned by actors María Guerrero and Fernando Díaz de Mendoza. It contains a small museum.

Teatro Margarita Xirgú Chacabuco 875. www.espacioteatral.com An intimate venue for all styles of music inside the lovely Casa de Catalunya building in San Telmo. Margarita Xirgu (1888–1969) was a Catalan actress who premiered Lorca’s banned La casa de Bernarda Alba (e House of Bernarda Alba) in Buenos Aires in 1945.

Club Amigos de la Vaca Profana Lavalle 3683 An intimate place hosting small jazz bands, serving drinks and tapas.

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Luna Park Av. Madero 420. www.lunapark.co.ar A legendary venue that opened in 1934, designed by architecture firm Chiappori & Quiroz. It has held famed boxing matches as well as hosting singers like Frank Sinatra, Cyndi Lauper and Ray Charles. It was where Perón first met Evita. In 2013 it hosted popular music events, including concerts by Ringo Starr, León Gieco and Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens).

La Trastienda Balcarce 460. www.latrastienda.com Situated in a house dating back to 1895 with tables and standing room, hosts jazz and rock. Jarvis Cocker has played here.

Teatro Gran Rex Av. Corrientes 857. www.teatro-granrex.com.ar An all-seated auditorium where Björk and Coldplay have performed, among others. e building is an art deco-style theatre, opened in 1937 as the largest cinema in South America (see p. 120).

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RESTAURANTS Il Vero Mangiare Batalla del Pari 700, corner of Rodríguez Far-flung Italian barrio restaurant with old photos on the walls. ere are many similar restaurants, but I like the home-made pasta and ravioli.

Pizzería Güerín Av. Corrientes 1368 Popular two-floor pizzeria, opened in 1932. A place porteños flock to. It is very populachero (popular) and informal and pizzas come in huge portions, so be careful not to over-order.

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Caseros Av. Caseros 486, near Parque Lezama and the Museo Histórico Nacional With its high ceiling, iron columns and fading colours, this is at street level below a luxury block of flats with bay windows designed by Christian Schindler in 1910. e menu is gourmet pasta, and they bake their own bread. Named after the famous battle of 1852 between Rosas and Urquiza.

Oviedo Berutti 2602, behind Hospital Alemán. www.oviedoresto.com.ar Expensive, smart and discreet, with great fish dishes from Mar del Plata.

Munich Recoleta Ortiz 1871, opposite the Recoleta cemetery entrance Despite its name, this is a traditional Argentine restaurant loved by porteños. Try the huevos Gramajo (scrambled eggs, chips and ham), invented by President Alvear’s secretary.

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Museo Evita Restaurante Juan María Gutiérrez 3926. www.museoevitaresto.com.ar Located in the museo dedicated to Evita, the building was designed by Estanislao Pirovano in 1923 as a petit hôtel before being taken over by Evita for abandoned women as part of her foundation. You can eat in the gran patio. Cuisine is Italo-Argentine.

Cabaña Las Lilas Av. Alicia Moreau de Justo 516, Puerto Madero. www.laslilas.com Looking on to Dique 4 in a red-brick warehouse, this restaurant features magnificent grilled beef from its own farm (cabaña means cattle ranch).

El Claustro San Martín 705. www.santacatalina.org.ar In the cloister of the Santa Catalina church and convent. You can eat out here under shady trees (see p. 36).

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Restaurante Palacio Español, or Club Español Bernardo de Irigoyen 180. www.clubespanolba.com.ar e restaurant, open to the public, is in an impressive building completed in Hispanic-Moorish style in 1911. e food is traditional Spanish (see p. 99).

Pizzería Los Inmortales Av. Corrientes 1369. Another popular upmarket pizzería, replete with tango images, which opened in 1952. A smart version of Pizzería Güerín.

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BARS AND CAFÉS Before the cafés, porteños met in pulperías (a pulpería is a bar and store), where they would chat and pass round maté to sip through the bombilla, or straw, or down rum. By 1750 there were four cafés in the city. Following Rosas’s exile, European coffee drinking took over. Most of the historic cafés in a café-mad city have vanished: the Café de París on San Martín, with eight mirrors and no windows; the Confitería del Aguila on Florida, where women could go; the Confitería El Molino (with its windmill sails, still on the facade) by the Congreso, where politicians idled; the Café Los Inmortales on Corrientes, 920–24, where writers and artists congregated (also known as the Café Brasil); and the English-club-styled Richmond on Florida.

La Biela Av. Quintana 600. www.labiela.com Fashionable and touristy. You can sit by a window inside or outside on the terrace, partly under the spreading gomero looking on to the Pilar church and Recoleta Gate. It’s on a corner, a hub of smart porteño culture. e place began as a pulpería on the city’s outskirts, then became the Aero Bar and finally La Biela, meaning a racing car’s connecting rod and alluding to the city’s speedy drivers and national hero Juan Fangio. ere are life-size models of writers Borges and Bioycasares at a table.

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Confitería Ideal Suipacha 384. www.confiteriaideal.com is café has known grander times and is essentially an indoor hall. Its decor is fading; its on-show onet silverware, columns, oak boiserie, stained-glass ceiling and grand elevator up to the tango hall have all dated, but still it reeks of the 1920s, when Buenos Aires ruled the world. It opened in 1912. Sometimes a women’s band or an organist would play, until recently. Try the thick hot chocolate. Upstairs is a tango dance hall (milonga, see p. 160).

Clásica y Moderna Av. Callao 892. www.classicaymoderna.com A bar, restaurant and bookshop. In the evenings it may hold concerts or book launches. Francisco Poblet and his wife Rosa Ferreiro opened it in 1938. eir children continue to run it as a family venture. It has a cobbled stone floor, brick walls and dark beams and was modernized in 1988.

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Confitería Las Violetas Av. Rivadavia 3899 e city’s best art deco café and cake shop, off the tracks in Almagro by Castro Barros subte station on Linea A. It opened in 1884, with stained glass, black-and-white tiles and tables and chairs from Paris. Closed in 1998, it was restored and reopened in 2001. ere’s also a restaurant.

Café de García Corner of Sanabria 3302 and Varela. www.cafedegarcia.com.ar Out in the suburbs of Villa Devoto, Café de García is almost the last of a type, a dotty museum of tango, football and boxing memorabilia, with billiard table, chess sets and a tiny, separate dining room in a museum of dusty musical instruments, where a waiter reels off the day’s menu. It opened in 1937 and has kept its antique expresso machine, its black-and-white-tiled floor, grilles and creepers (glicinas).

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La Puerto Rico Adolfo Alsina 416, off the Plaza de Mayo. www.lapuertoricocafe.com.ar Opened in 1887, this famous historic café is local and traditional, and doubles as a tango bar. Don Gumersindo Cabedo founded it on Perú street, naming it after the Caribbean island where he’d lived. It moved in 1925 to its current site close to the Museo de la Ciudad.

Café Retiro Retiro station, Ramos Mejía 1348 Located in the Retiro train station, this café, with high ceilings and founded in 1915, retains its grandeur. It suggests how opulent the stations once were. In the bustle of a railway station, it’s an oasis of tranquillity.

Gran Café Tortoni Av. de Mayo 825. www.cafetortoni.com.ar Opened in 1892 (see p. 191), although it was founded in 1858. It’s on the main tourist track and is probably the most famous of the city cafés.

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Cafés with Gardens Various locations Cafés with outdoor space are at a premium in the summertime. On Marcelo T. de Alvear, at 2346, the Instituto Argentino de Diagnóstico, originally a palace (1926), has outdoor tables in its courtyard, with fountain, shade from trees and cheeky sparrows. e indoor café-restaurant has floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a tiled floor and chandeliers. is was once the hospital’s chapel; it opened as a café in 2005. Sitting under a magnolia, you can look up to the room in which Evita was operated on. Del Lector is at Agüero 2502, just by the Biblioteca Nacional and the reading garden. You can sit outside, read, watch the cats. e Establecimiento General del Café (becoming a chain) at Pueyrredón 1529 sells the best ground coffee in the city. You walk into a long, high room and a patio with birch trees, free of traffic noise – a quiet space.

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LISTINGS

Ice-cream Parlours Various locations Argentine ice creams are great, especially the dulce de leche variations at Persicco, Volta and Freddo – the three best chains. Try the traditional Heladería Cadore on Av. Corrientes, 1695, too.

SHOPS Galerías Pacífico Florida 737. www.galeriaspacifico.co.ar Now restored, Galerías Pacífico dates from 1889, with wonderful murals, and attached to it is the Centro Cultural Borges. It’s one of the best malls in the city (see p. 121).

Alto Palermo Shopping Av. Santa Fe 3253 Trendy, packed and sells almost everything. It’s a boon in the summer as it’s air-conditioned. ere are restaurants and a cinema nearby. It’s like a cruise ship grounded in the city.

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Patio Bullrich Entrances on Posada and Av. del Libertador 750. www.shoppingbullrich.com.ar Buenos Aires’s upper-class mall, redesigned from a cattle auction house. As well as smart shops, it has restaurants and cinemas (see p. 146).

Abasto Shopping Av. Corrientes 3247. www.abasto-shopping.com.ar In Gardel’s territory. Like the other malls mentioned, it has been renovated – in this case from the art deco fruit and vegetable market and to a high standard. It also has restaurants, a children’s playground and cinemas (see pp. 146, 157).

Recoleta Mall Vicente López 2050, Recoleta. www.recoletamall.com.ar Reopened in 2011 with four floors, 75 shops, ten cinemas and a roof garden. Very central.

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Galería Güemes Entrance on Florida 165. www.galeriaguemes.com.ar One of the first indoor malls in the city, it’s really a long passage with shops, near the Plaza de Mayo (see pp. 114, 161).

Palermo Viejo Around Plazoleta Cortázor (Plaza Serrano) and Plaza Palermo Viejo Palermo Viejo is a good area for shopping for everything from furniture to antiques, shoes and especially clothes; along Serrano, ames and Gurruchaga and their side streets. is area is divided into Palermo Viejo, Palermo Soho and, across the rail tracks, Palermo Hollywood. Also worth a visit are the shops along Av. Santa Fe, from Av. Pueyrredón to Plaza San Martín, and the parallel streets Juncal and Arenales between Av. Callao and Av. 9 de Julio.

Feria de San Telmo Centred around Plaza Dorrego. www.feriadesantelmo.com

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An outdoor flea market, open on Sundays, with its centre on Plaza Dorrego and along Defensa. It was created by architect José María Peña in 1970. Crowded, fun and sells everything. You should also visit the old covered San Telmo market, designed by Juan Buschiazzo in 1897, with its iron beams and stalls – entry on Bolívar 954 (see p. 210).

Feria de Mataderos Lisandro de la Torre and Av. de los Corrales. www.feriademataderos.com.ar is outdoor market celebrates Argentine traditions of all kinds. It was created in 1988 on the southwest city limits, where cattle used to be slaughtered. It’s where country and gaucho culture enters the city; with over 300 stalls, if offers antiques and crafts, speciality foods like empanadas and locro (a meat and vegetable stew from the north), folk music and tango. Very lively.

Feria de Artesanos de Plaza Francia Plaza Francia. www.feriaplazafrancia.com An outdoor arts and craft market that spreads its stalls around the Centro Recoleta and the Pilar Church. Busy on weekends.

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CHRONOLOGY

1536 Diego de Mendoza founds Buenos Aires, but after four years, abandons the small settlement. 1580 Juan de Garay re-founds Buenos Aires. 1776 Viceroyalty of the River Plate founded, including Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. First virrey sent out from Spain.

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1806–7 English invasions and two defeats of English troops. 1810 Cabildo abierto calls for independence from Spain as Provincias Unidas. 1816 Independence from Spain declared in Tucumán. 1829 Juan Manuel de Rosas asked to step in and put Argentina in order. A civil war ensues. 1852 General Urquiza defeats Rosas and becomes president.

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1857 First Hotel de Inmigrantes built for the waves of European immigrants who arrive. 1880 Buenos Aires becomes a federalized capital under General Roca. 1884–94 Creation of Avenida de Mayo. 1912 Universal male suffrage for over-18s. 1916–30 Hipólito Yrigoyen elected populist president for the Radical Civic Union party, after years of armed struggle. 1930 Military coup and start of the Década Infame.

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1936 Construction of the Obelisco and widening of Avenida Corrientes. 1946 Juan Domingo Perón elected president. Start of Peronism’s long hold on power. 1952 Death of Evita Perón. 1955 Fall of Perón, followed by military dictatorships. 1973–4 Perón re-elected. He dies a year later.

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C H R O N O LO G Y

1976 A coup d’état overthrows Isabel Péron and is replaced by a junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla; his dictatorship leads to the ‘disappearance’ of perhaps 30,000 individuals. 1977 e Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo begin their ursday vigils. 2 April–14 June 1982 e Falklands War lasts 74 days; it begins with the invasion of the Malvinas/Falklands by Argentina and ends with its surrender. 1983 Election of Raúl Alfonsín. 1989 Election of Carlos Saúl Menem, whose policies helped stem the country’s hyperinflation.

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2001 Fall of president De la Rúa, cacerolazos, sacking of supermarkets, and the country’s debt default to the world’s banks, owing around $95 billion. 2003 Election of President Néstor Kirchner. 2007 Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, his wife and then widow, is elected Argentina’s first female president. 2011 In the October elections, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner wins a second five-year term, with an increased majority of 54.1 per cent.

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Suggested Reading and Viewing

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Books Abós, Álvaro, Al pie de la letra: Guía literaria de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2000) Aizenberg, Edna, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing (Hanover, 2002) ‘Argentine eme Issue’, e Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 18 (1992) Barnes, John, Eva Perón (London, 1978) Bethell, Leslie, ed., Argentina since Independence (Cambridge, 1993) Biggins, Alan, Buenos Aires (Oxford, 2000) Bigongiari, Diego, Buenos Aires, sus alrededores, y costas del Uruguay, La Guía Pirelli (Buenos Aires, 1993) Buenos Aires, Insight City Guide (Singapore, 1988) ‘Buenos Aires, ciudad y país: Un modelo para armar’, Revista del Museo Histórico Sarmiento, 3 (2006) Burton, Richard F., Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (London, 1870) Canaparo, Claudio, Muerte y transfiguración de la cultura rioplatense (Buenos Aires, 2005) Carril, Bonifacio del, and Aguirre Saravia, Aníbal, Iconografía de Buenos Aires: La ciudad de Garay hasta 1852 (Buenos Aires, 1982) Chatwin, Bruce, In Patagonia (London, 1977) Cowles, Fleur, Bloody Precedent: e Perón Story (London, 1952) Crawley, Eduardo, A House Divided: Argentina, 1880–1980 (London, 1984) Darbyshire, Charles, My Life in the Argentine Republic (London, 1917) Echeverría, Esteban, Slaughter Yard, ed., introd. and trans. Norman omas di Giovanni and Susan Ashe (London, 2010)

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SUGGESTED READING AND VIEWING

Escardó, Florencio, Nueva geografía de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1971) Floria, Carlos Alberto, and César García Belsunce, Historia de los Argentinos, 2 vols (Buenos Aires, 1993) France, Miranda, Bad Times in Buenos Aires (London, 1998) Gallardo, Ángel, Memorias (Buenos Aires, 2003) Gallo, Klaus, Las invasiones inglesas (Buenos Aires, 2004) García de D’Agostino, Olga M., et al., Imagen de Buenos Aires a través de los viajeros, 1870–1910 (Buenos Aires, 1981) Giunta, Rodolfo, La gran aldea y la revolución industrial: Buenos Aires, 1860–1870 (Buenos Aires, 2006) Goñi, Uki, e Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina (London, 2003) Graham-Yooll, Andrew, Goodbye Buenos Aires (Nottingham, 1999) —, e Forgotten Colony: A History of the English-speaking Communities in Argentina (London, 1981) —, A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina’s Nightmare (London, 1986) Gregory, Desmond, Brute New World: e Rediscovery of Latin America in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1992) Groussac, Paul, Santiago de Liniers (Buenos Aires, 1943) Guy, Donna J., Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln, ne, 1991) Hedges, Jill, Argentina: A Modern History (London, 2011) Hudson, W. H., Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (London, 1918) Ibarguren, Carlos, Manuelita Rosas (Buenos Aires, 1933) —, La historia que he vivido (Buenos Aires, 1955) Isherwood, Christopher, e Condor and the Cows (London, 1949) Joseph, Ray, Argentine Diary: e Inside Story of the Coming of Fascism (London, 1943) King, J. Anthony, Twenty-four Years in the Argentine Republic (New York, 1846) King, John, El Di Tella y el desarrollo cultural argentino en la década del sesenta (Buenos Aires, 2007) Koebel, W. H., Argentina: Past and Present (London, 1914) Korn, Francis, Buenos Aires: Los huéspedes del 20 (Buenos Aires, 1974) Krauze, Enrique, Redentores, ideas y poder en América Latina (México, 2011)

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BUENOS AIRES

Lanata, Jorge, Argentinos, 2 vols (Buenos Aires, 2002) Larreta, Enrique, Las dos fundaciones de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1943) Leonard, Irving (compiler), Colonial Travelers in Latin America (Newark, nj, 1972) Lewis, Colin M., Argentina: A Short History (Oxford, 2002) Londres, Albert, e Road to Buenos Aires (London, 1928) Luna, Félix, Breve historia de los argentinos (Buenos Aires, 1993) —, Soy Roca (Buenos Aires, 1989) —, Conflictos y armonías en la historia argentina (Buenos Aires, 1989) Luqui Lagleyze, Julio A., Buenos Aires: Sencilla historia (Buenos Aires, 1998) Marechal, Leopoldo, Historia de la Calle Corrientes (Buenos Aires, 1967) Márquez Miranda, Fernando, Ameghino: Una vida heroica (Buenos Aires, 1951) Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel, La cabeza de Goliat [1940] (Buenos Aires, 1968) Mastronardi, Carlos, Memorias de un provinciano (Buenos Aires, 1967) Matamoro, Blas, La casa porteña (Buenos Aires, 1971) Moya, Jose C., Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 (London, 1998) Mujica Lainez, Manuel, Los porteños (Buenos Aires, 1980) Newitt, Malyn, ed., War, Revolution and Society in the Rio de la Plata, 1808–1810 (Oxford, 2010) Nogués, Germinal, Buenos Aires, ciudad secreta (Buenos Aires, 1996) Ocampo, Victoria, ‘Carta’, Autobiografía ii (Buenos Aires, 1981) Palacios, Ernesto, Historia de la Argentina, 1515–1983 (Buenos Aires, 1986) Pérez Carrasco, Mariano, El Centro de Buenos Aires (unpublished manuscript) Pitt, Ingrid, Life’s a Scream (London, 1999) Prignano, Angel, Buenos Aires, higienica agua y cloaca (Buenos Aires, 2000) Quesada, Vicente, Memorias de un viejo [1912], prologue by Isidoro J. Ruiz Moreno (Buenos Aires, 1998) Ramos Mejía, José María, Las multitudes argentinas (Buenos Aires, 1899)

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SUGGESTED READING AND VIEWING

Rock, David, Argentina, 1516–1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands and Alfonsín (London, 1987) Romero, Luis Alberto, A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century, trans. James Brennan (Pennsylvania, 2002) Ross, Stanley R., and omas F. McGann, eds, Buenos Aires: 400 Years (Austin, tx, 1982) Sáenz Quesada, María, Mariquita Sánchez: Vida política y sentimental (Buenos Aires, 1995) Salas, Alberto, Relación parcial de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1955) Sarlo, Beatriz, La ciudad vista: Mercancías y cultura urbana (Buenos Aires, 2009) Schmidl, Ulrico, Derrotero y viaje a España y Las Indias, trans. Edmundo Wernicke (Buenos Aires, 1980) Shumway, Nicolas, e Invention of Argentina (Berkeley, ca, 1991) Tella, Guillermo, ‘El palacio de Correos’, Vivienda (October 1996), pp. 136–40 Timerman, Jacobo, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (London, 1981) Vázquez-Rial, Horacio, Buenos Aires, 1880–1930: La capital de un imperio imaginario (Madrid, 1996) Verbitsky, Horacio, El vuelo. ‘Una forma cristiana de muerte’: Confesiones de un oficial de la Armada (Buenos Aires, 2004) Watson, Ricardo, Lucas Rentero and Gabriel Di Meglio, Buenos Aires tiene historia: Once itinerarios guiados por la ciudad (Buenos Aires, 2008) —, Buenos Aires de fiesta: Luces y sombras del Centenario (Buenos Aires, 2010) White, John W., Argentina: e Life Story of a Nation (New York, 1942) Wilde, José Antonio, Buenos Aires setenta años atrás (Buenos Aires, 1879) Wilson, Jason, Buenos Aires: A Cultural and Literary Companion (Oxford, 1999 and 2007) —, Jorge Luis Borges (London, 2006)

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Films Bemberg, María Luisa, dir., Camila (1984) Bielinsky, Fabián, dir., Nueve reinas (Nine Queens, 2000) Borensztein, Sebastián, dir., Un cuento chino (Chinese Take-Away, 2011) Burman, Daniel, dir., El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace, 2004) Caetano, Adrián, dir., Bolivia (2001) Campanella, Juan José, dir., El secreto de sus ojos (e Secret in their Eyes, 2010) Piñeyro, Marcelo, dir., Plata quemada (Burnt Money, 2000) Puenzo, Luis, dir., La historia oficial (e Official Story, 1985) Trapero, Pablo, dir., Carancho (2010) —, dir., Elefante blanco (White Elephant, 2012)

Online Bares Notables e city has a Bares Notables list of 75 cafés, available in book form as Cafés Notables de Buenos Aires from most bookshops and from La Casa de la Cultura de la Ciudad on Av. de Mayo, 575. Almost all (73 of 75) are listed on es.wikipedia.org

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www.buenosairesbus.com Hop on and off 24 stops www.buenosairesherald.com e city’s main English-language newspaper, started in 1876 www.buenosairesnightguide.com Buenos Aires nightlife: restaurants, bars, cafés and clubs are listed www.gaymapbuenosaires.com Gay Map Buenos Aires, practical guide to the city’s gay scene www.museos.buenosaires.gob.ar Museums run by the city; their boletín is worth subscribing to

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SUGGESTED READING AND VIEWING

www.saltshaker.net American chef, sommelier and food writer Dan Perlman’s site, with reviews of traditional Argentine restaurants, guides to food shopping in Buenos Aires, and information on the city’s dining scene www.wander-argentina.com Resources on life and travel in Argentina, by people who live there

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www.whatsupbuenosaires.com What’s Up Buenos Aires, for nightlife listings; dancing and clubs in the city start very late, after midnight

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Acknowledgements

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My gratitude to Andrea Parodi, Camila Wilson, Enrique Quesada, Gabriela and Pino Marrone, Malena Ibargurren, Dr David Henn, Graciela Olivieri, Anke Kornmüller, Eduardo Berti, Sarah Gilbert, Jorge Aiello, Matías Vallebella, Alejandro Manara and especially to Soledad Saubidet for her wonderful historical walks. I would like to thank Vivian Constantinopoulos, Aimee Selby and the team at Reaktion Books for the immense work in the final production of this guide. I have incurred countless debts to many others who have contributed, without knowing it, though most are in the Suggested Reading section.

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Photo Acknowledgements

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The author and the publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it.

Alamy: pp. 8–9 (Yadid Levy); Luis Argerich: pp. 22–4; El Ateneo, Buenos Aires: p. 203; Jimmy Baikovicius: p. 180; Mariano Barba: pp. 6–7, 8–9, 12, 16, 17, 18–19, 150–51, 167, 192 (top), 193, 198–9; courtesy of the Estate of Antonio Berni: p. 197; Buenos Aires Ciudad: p. 181 (bottom); Philip Capper: p. 185; William Caskey: p. 172; Corbis: p. 163 (Stephan Frémont); Elemaki: p. 186; Claudio Elias: p. 187; Roberto Fiadone: pp. 207, 208; Meghan Hess: p. 161; Getty Images: pp. 132, 210 (John W. Banagan); Iberia Airlines: p. 127; Ignacioerrico: p. 103; iStockphoto: pp. 45 (wsfurlan), 154 (Magaiza); Sam Kelly: pp. 170–71; Library of Congress, Washington, dc: p. 93; courtesy of the Estate of Léonie Matthis: p. 28; Museum of the Argentine Bicentennial: p. 82 (top); José María Pérez Nuñez: p. 26; OneEuropeanHeart: p. 196; Pmt7ar: p. 80; Marcos Prack: p. 58; Presidency of the Nation of Argentina: p. 153; Rcidte: p. 85 top; Rex Features: pp. 10–11 (James D. Morgan); Shutterstock: pp. 26 (javaman), 38, 48 (meunierd), 66 (Procy), 82 (Eduardo Rivero), 165 (Rafael Martín Gaitero); Sking: p. 135; Martin St-Amant: p. 121; Max Sviridov: p.178; Jacobo Tarrio: p. 109; David Thurston: pp. 14–15; © Miguel Veny 2011: p. 192 (bottom); David Weekly: p. 169; Jason Wilson: pp. 13, 24, 25, 30, 37, 55, 61, 71, 97, 102, 105, 115, 147, 156, 159 (bottom), 162, 166, 181 (top), 209.

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Index

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Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Abasto Mall 146, 157, 159, 164 Aizenberg, Roberto 151 Alberdi, Juan Bautista 72, 76, 82, 98 Alem, Leandro 93–4 Alfonsín, Raúl 118, 141, 143 Álvarez, Mario 123, 146 Alvear, General Carlos María de 103–4 Alvear, Marcelo T. 106, 112–13, 115, 191 Alvear, Torcuato de 103–4, 105, 179 Álzaga, Martín de 44, 54, 62, 87 Ambrosetti, Juan B. 87 Ameghino, Florentino 110, 204 Angelis, Pedro de 60 Aramburu, General Eugenio 134–5 Artigas, José Gervasio 74 Ateneo bookshop (Grand Splendid) 202, 203, 204 Avellaneda, Marcos 65–6 Avellaneda, Nicolás 79, 83 Avenida 9 de Julio 20, 21, 24, 80 Avenida Boedo 113 Avenida Callao 4, 105

Avenida Córdoba 100, 105, 107, 111, 117, 121, 122, 132, 177 Avenida Corrientes 21, 56, 57, 120, 123, 124, 126, 157, 160, 201 Avenida de Mayo, 104, 109, 116, 120, 188, 190–94 Avenida Quintana 105 Avenida Santa Fe 4 Azurduy, Juana 188 Bacle, César Hipólito 60, 83 Barrio Norte 33, 52, 84, 85, 127, 184 Barrio Parque 116, 179, 180 Barrio Sur 33, 85, 176 Bateman, John 107 Bedel, Jacques 39 Belgrano, Manuel 36, 49, 189 Bemberg, María Luisa 197 Benedit, Luis 39 Beresford, General William Carr 43, 49, 54 Bergoglio, Jorge (Pope Francis i) 153, 168 Berni, Antonio 195–6, 197 Beruti, Antonio 52 Biblioteca Nacional (National Library) 134, 135, 144, 204

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INDEX

Biblioteca Nacional (Old National Library) 92, 175 Biscay, Azcarate du 37 Blanes, Juan Manuel 77, 86, 90, 92 Boca, La (barrio) 29, 63, 87, 97, 98, 99, 117, 133, 158, 161, 164, 176, 178, 191, 200 Boca Juniors 164, 165 Bolívar (street) 48 Bolívar, Simón, 53 Bombonera, La 164, 165 Bonpland, Aimé 59, 60 bookshops 201–3 Borges, Jorge Luis 23, 28, 116, 121, 131, 172, 173–6, 191 Borges, Norah 173, 175 Bourdon, Albert 122 Bourdelle, Antoine 104 Boye, Olaf 107 Brown, Guillermo 63 Bullrich, Franciso 136 Burton, Sir Richard 77, 78 Buschiazzo, Juan 39, 51, 83, 84, 87, 95, 183, 190 Bustillo, Alejandro 104, 107, 114, 133, 134, 163, 197 Cabildo 32, 34, 35, 42, 44, 51, 52, 53, 60, 75, 104, 141, 189 Cabot, Sebastian 27 cacerolazo (protest) 148 Café Tortoni 191, 192 Calfurcurá 58 Cámpora, Dr Héctor José 138 Carlsen, Rudolf 42 Carriego, Evaristo 173

cartoneros (waste collectors) 21, 149 Casa Amarilla 61, 63, Casa Rosada 81, 82, 108, 111, 113, 127, 128, 129, 133, 141, 145, 147, 188, 189, 191, 194 Castelli, Juan José 53, 54 Castelli, Pedro 66 cathedral 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 44, 55, 56, 65, 77, 85, 101, 134, 189 cautivas 58, 90 centenary of independence, 1910 109 Centro Cultural Recoleta 39 Cevallos, Pedro de 33 Chacarita cemetery 84, 112, 113, 156, 157, 184 Chatwin, Bruce 106 Christophersen, Alejandro 56, 100, 179, 184, 191 cinema 120–22 Cisneros, Baltasar Hidalgo de 46, 51 Clarín (newspaper) 149 Clemenceau, Georges 80 colectivo (bus) 22, 22, 103, 108, 153, 166 Colegio Nacional 46–7 Colón, El 77, 80, 100, 104, 139, 142 Colón, El (demolished) 60, 77, 78, 94, 189 Concolorcorvo (Calixto Bustamente Carlos) 41–2 Conder, Roger 101 Confitería Ideal 161 Constitución station 102, 103

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conventillo (tenement) 86, 98 corralito (corral) 147 Cortázar, Julio 191 Cunninghame Graham, Robert 34

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Darwin, Charles 59, 72, 74–5 Daumas, Louis-Joseph 55 debt default 147 década infame (Infamous Decade) 118 Díaz de Solís, Juan 27 disappeared 73, 139, 140, 151, 151, 153 D’Orbigny, Alcides 65, 85 Dormal, Jules (Julio) 95, 108 Dorrego, Manuel 65 Dourge, Léon 104 Duhalde, Eduardo 148 Echeverría, Esteban 72, 77 Einstein, Albert 115 English invasions 43, 51 esma (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada) 140 Evita see Eva Perón Ezcurra, Doña Encarnación 72–3 Ezeiza (airport) 20 Falcón, Colonel Ramón 105, 105 Falklands War see Malvinas/Falklands War federales 53, 68, 76, 79 Florida (street) 56, 75, 95, 96, 111, 112, 113, 114, 121, 131, 146, 161, 174, 175, 201 Follet, Sydney 101

football 167–9 Fortabat, Amalia 146, 197, 200 French, Domingo 52 frigorífico (meat refrigeration plant) 79 Frondizi, Arturo 135 Galería Güemes 114 Galerías Pacífico 120 Garay, Juan de 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 40, 49 García Lorca, Federico 106, 116, 191 García Márquez, Gabriel 136 Gardel, Carlos (Charles Romuald Gardés) 126, 156, 157–8, 159, 163, 191 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 63–4 General Paz, Avenida 20 Giovanni, Severino di 106 Graham-Yooll, Andrew 112, 141 Groussac, Paul 92 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 135, 136, 163 Guevara, Isabel de 31 Gutiérrez, Juan María 73 Harrods 113, 174 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugène 104 Hernández, José 79, 189 hincha (football fan) 22, 168 Hotel de Inmigrantes 91, 96, 99 Hudson, W. H. 41, 70, 182 Illia, Arturo 135 immigration 34, 41, 60, 78, 91, 93, 97–100, 109

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inflation 144, 151 Instituto Torcuato Di Tella 136, 137 Isherwood, Christopher 105

Luna, Félix 69, 81, 87, 90, 92, 120, 127, 129, 130 Luna Park 126 Lynch, John 65, 68, 74

Jardín Botánico Carlos Thays (Botanical Garden) 179, 180, 181, 181 Jewish community 145–6 Jockey Club 94, 95, 96, 112, 133 Jorge Newbury (airport) 20 Justo, General Agustín 119, 120

MacCann, William 22–3 Macció, Rómulo 165, 166 Madero, Eduardo 96 Madres de Plaza de Mayo; Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo 139, 140, 149, 189 Magellan, Ferdinand (Fernão de Magalhães) 27 Maillart, Norbert 142 Malvinas/Falklands War 57, 141, 169 Mansilla, Lucio 70 mantero (street vendor) 21 Manzana de las Luces 49, 137 Manzana Loca 136 Manzi, Homero 162 Maradona, Diego 145, 148–9, 165, 166 Mármol, José 49, 74 Martín García 27, 63, 83, 90, 111, 113, 127 Martin, Louis 95 Mathis, Leonie 28 Mazorca 67–8, 72, 73, 74, 110 Meano, Vittorio 80, 108 Mendoza, Pedro de 27, 28, 29, 30, 178 Menem, Carlos Saúl 137, 142, 144–8, 184 Mercado San Telmo (market) 210 micro (long-distance bus) 102, 148

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Kavanagh Building 56, 58, King, J. Anthony 74 kiosco 22, 23 Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de 128, 149 Kirchner, Néstor 21, 140, 148–9 Koebel, W. H. 21 Lanusse, Alejandro 138 Lavalle, Juan 65, 66, 66 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) 114, 124 Liniers, Santiago de 44, 50, 53, 54, 62, 67 Lloyds (Banco Hipotecario) 138 Londres, Alberto 117 López, Lucio 34, 87 López Rega, José 132, 139 Ludwig, Pablo, map of Buenos Aires 91 Lugones, Leopoldo 92, 117, 118, 119, 120, 184

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milonga (tango dance hall) 157, 160 Miranda, Francisco de 43 Mitre, General Bartomolé 46, 47, 58, 61, 76, 78–9 Montoneros 132, 135, 138, 142 Monumental, El (stadium) 168, 170, 171 Monumento a los Españoles 110 Mora, Lola 177 Moreno, Mariano 52, 53 Moya, José C. 21 Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta, 206–8, 207 Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Fernández Blanco 208, 209 Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (malba) 195, 196 Museo Gardel 157–8 Museo Mitre 46, 47 Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes 107, 197 Museo Sívori 200 Museo Xul Solar 175 Nación, La (newspaper) 46, 149 Naipaul, V. S. 186 Neruda, Pablo 116 Noel, Martín 206, 208 Nuestra Señora del Pilar (church) 39, 163 Obelisco, El 24, 36, 123, 124, 126

Ocampo, Victoria 116 O’Gorman, Camila 62 Onganía, General Juan Carlos 136 Palacio Barolo 191–3, 193 Palacio de Aguas Corrientes 106–7, 132 Palacio de Justicia (Tribunales) 93, 142 Palacio del Congreso 108, 109, 193–4 Palacio Estramagou 115 Palanti, Mario 191–2, 193 Palermo (barrio) 28, 55, 69, 70, 76, 77, 81, 94, 108, 110, 113, 134, 137, 146, 173, 176, 180, 182, 200, 216, 224 Pallière, Jean Léon 50, 69, 195 Paraguay (street) 162 Paraná (river) 27, 31, 78, 100, 107 Paraná (street) 162 Parque de la Memoria 149–51 Parque Lezama 29, 178, 179 Parque Natural y Zona de Reserva Ecológica 177, 178 Pater, Paul 95 Pavlova, Anna 106 Pellegrini, Aldo 203 Pellegrini, Carlos 93–4 Pellegrini, Charles Henri 36, 43, 44, 60, 195 Peña, José María 20 Perlotti, Luis 122 Perón, Eva (Evita; María Eva Duarte de Perón) 125, 127–30, 132, 139, 184, 188

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INDEX

Perón, Isabelita (María Estela Martínez) 139 Perón, Juan Domingo 111, 125–8, 130–33, 134, 138, 139, 158, 174, 189 Peronism 73, 126, 130, 132, 138, 148, 149, 226 Piazzolla, Astor 160–61 piquetero (street protest) 21, 73, 149 Pirámide de Mayo 44, 45, 139, 189 Plaza Colón 188 Plaza Francia 110, 179 Plaza Hotel 56, 57, Plaza Lavalle 66, 93, 100, 142, 145 Plaza de Mayo 40, 51, 53, 54, 60, 77, 80, 81, 84, 104, 119, 126, 127, 128, 133, 139, 141, 147, 149, 185, 190 Plaza San Martín 55, 56, 136, 174 Plaza de la Victoria 44, 77, 83, 84, 85 Popham, Admiral Sir 51, 53 Porteña, La (steam engine) 100, 101 Poynter, Ambrose 102 Prebisch, Alberto 24, 120, 124 Prensa, La (newspaper) 56, 131, 190–91 Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (El Proceso) 139 psychoanalysis 137–8 Puente Transbordador 166, 167

Puerto Madero 23, 96, 103, 138, 146, 147, 178 Pueyrredón, Juan Martín 44 Pueyrredón, Prilidiano 84, 131, 195 Quesada, Vicente 21, 45, 70, 72, 74, 142 Quilmes 43 Quinquela Martín, Benito 166, 200 Quintana, Manuel J. 104 Quiroga, Facundo 81–2, 184, 187 Radical Party see Unión Cívica Radical 93, 108–9, 118 Radowitsky, Simón 105–6 Ramírez, Francisco ‘Pancho’ 59, 189 Recoleta, La (cemetery) 39, 83, 84, 107, 132, 183–6 Retiro, Estación 100–101, 101 Riachuelo 20, 28, 29, 32 Rivadavia, Bernardino 39, 47, 49, 54, 59–61, 63, 65, 183 Roca, General Julio Argentino 81, 90–92, 103 Roca, Julio 119 Rodin, Auguste 70, 71, 104, 106, 180, 193 Rosas, Manuel de 49, 50, 55, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67, 67–9, 72–3, 76, 134, 145, 184 Rosas, Manuela 62, 69, 70 Rozas, General Prudencio Ortiz de 66 Rúa, Fernando de la 147–8

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Rufina Cambaceres Mausoleum, La Recoleta 186 Saavedra, Colonel Cornelio 52 Sábato, Ernesto 84, 141, 179 Sáenz Peña, President Roque 110, 118 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 114 Sánchez de Thompson, Mariquita 75–6 San Ignacio (church) 47, 48 San Martín (street) 37 San Martín, General José 53, 54–6, 57, 65 Santa Catalina de Siena (church) 36, 37 Santo Domingo (church) 35, 36, 46, 54 Sarlo, Beatriz 146–7 Sarmiento, Domingo 62, 69, 70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81–3, 84, 126, 134 Sastre, Marcos 201–3 Schmidl, Ulrich 27, 28, 29, 29, 31 semana trágica, la 111–12 Sergent, René 106 shanty town see villa miseria shopping malls 146 Spanish Civil War 119–20, 194 Spilimbergo, Lino Enea 196–7 subte (metro) 108, 133, 144 tango 28, 98, 109, 113, 117, 123, 126, 146, 157, 158, 160–61, 162, 163, 176, 191 Taylor, Eduardo 78, 189 telos (‘love hotels’) 186

Testa, Clorindo 39, 136, 138 Thatcher, Margaret 141, 144 Thays, Carlos (Charles) 104, 109, 179–80, 201 Thurson, David 14–15 theatres 122–3 Timerman, Jacobo 136 Torre de los Ingleses (Torre Monumental de Retiro) 102, 110 Troilo, Aníbal 162 Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Party) 93, 108–9, 118 unitarios 53, 67, 68, 72, 73 Uriburu, José Félix 106, 118 Urquiza, General José 61, 72, 76–7, 78–9 Usina del Arts 97 Valle, Ángel Della, La Casa Rosada 82 Verdi, Giuseppe 77, 80 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín 77 Videla, General Jorge 139 Villa Desocupación 87, 89 villa miseria (shanty town) 87, 102, 148–9, 196 Vingbooms, Johannes 32 Viñals, José 164, 196 Viñoly, Rafael 146, 197 War of the Triple Alliance 79 Wast, Hugo (Gustavo Martínez Zuviría) 120, 175 Whitelocke, General John 45–6 white slave trade 115, 207

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yellow fever epidemic 50, 59, 84, 86 Yrigoyen, Hipólito 28, 93, 94, 106, 108, 110–11, 118, 119, 194 Yrurtia, Rogelio 61, 65, 142, 209

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