Buenos Aires for your hols? I hear “Yes, but it’s so expensive,” or “Yes, but it’s unsafe”
Well, everyone has a different travel story, but I spent March in BA and my experience was that neither of the above is true. And in fact, the closer you get to doing what ordinary Porteños do, the cheaper and safer it is. Here are a few of things I did, and I spent... exactly nothing.
1. A great way to walk the streets with no traffick! They say there’s safety in numbers, so what better than a big demonstration...Argy style? And in BA they certainly do them big. It has taken 30 years for Argentines to get an annual public holiday to commemorate the 30,000 people who ‘disappeared’ during the 1976-82 Military Dictatorship. After such a long wait, organizations like the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, have been rewarded with not one, but two days to hold commemorative events on 14/15 March. Walking from Congress to the Casa Rosada you meet all strata of society, lots of noise, lots of humour, singing, drumming, and can start to understand Argentine history and what makes the people tick.
Cost? Nothing, but sore feet.
2. The best tenor in the world al aire libre. Coincidentally, March 14 also saw the world’s greatest tenor, Placido Domingo, performing on a specially constructed outdoor stage at the Obelisk on BA’s main avenue, the 9 de Julio. In a bizarre twist, he had been booked to perform at the Colón Opera opposite but its orchestra, which has been locked in a long industrial dispute, refused to play inside the opera house. But they came out to play in solidarity with the seemingly ageless Placido, and instead of the usual elite audience, 60,000 ordinary folk turned up to enjoy an unforgettable three hour concert in a stupendous setting. Good on yer, Placido.
Cost? Nothing, but a wait to get a good view.
3. Beautiful city parks are not unique to Buenos Aires, of course, but the trees certainly are. They are spectacular. March is when many species bloom, the red-flowered ceibo, the lapacho, the ombu, and (later) the violet jacarandá. As well as having beautiful white flowers, the ombu is huge and fire resistant; the one in the Recoleta has a 50 feet girth, so big its branches have to be held up by crutches. Walking the parks to discover Argentina’s flora in a nutshell is such a pleasure and it save you money in transport. Try the fifty blocks from Retiro through Palermo to Belgrano.
Cost? Nothing, except time
4. Football as everyone knows is an Argentine passion, but going to big stadiums like River or Boca can be expensive. Yet I saw a fantastic game when I visited the 15-metre mural painted on the side of the mono-block where Manchester City’s Carlos Tevez was born in an infamous housing estate on the outskirts of BA known as Fuerte Apache. Tevez was discovered playing on a dirt pitch by local coach ‘Didi’, but the Tevez effect means the Apache youth football club’s new protegés play on astro-turf. I watched two teams of amazingly skilful twelve year olds strut their stuff. Move over, Carlos.
Cost? Bus fare, and some initial nervous moments wondering if I would come out of San Apache’s notorious birthplace alive.
5. La Noche de Vela - free events all night, all over the city. Even at normal times B.A. is known as ‘the city that never sleeps’ and the streets of the centre are bustling at 2 or 3 am. But on March 26, the city organized a Noche en Vela when not only was it awake all night with theatre, dance, projections, music, cinema, literary tours, but it was all free. My personal night included some imaginative stuff:
First at dusk by the river in La Boca, the Fundación Proa’s exhibition of Louise Bourgeois sculptures had a light show outside on Mother, her monumental iron spider, followed by a showing of Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Kid’ with live music.
On to San Telmo, BA’s historic centre where I have walked many times without knowing the significance of the churches and the houses. Now I know their intimate details after a walking tour of the love lives of the city’s founding fathers. Historian Eduardo Lazzari took us four blocks through Viceroy Linier’s three fated women, to Presidents Bernardino Rivadia and Manuel Belgrano’s philanderings and illegimate children, to Manuel Moreno’s wife 100 love letters to him not knowing he was dead, to the great orator Castelli’s tragedy to getting tongue cancer and needing it to be cut out with red hot pincers, even to the trysts organized by the Franciscan monks for Perón and Evita.
At midnight, appropriately, I went to a performance Dante’s ‘Pergatory’ in the great baroque Palacio Barolo, a building modelled by the Dante fan Italian architect on the descending circles in the Divine Comedy. Not usually open to the public, Porteños came en masse to see the building as much as the play.
The rest of the night was spent walking between the various open air tango dance and music shows finishing at the big one, the Escenario del Tango on the corner of Corrientes and Callao avenues where the public milonga started at 4.30 am. Being March, it was still quite warm in the early hours but not those stifling airless BA nights of mid summer.
Cost? Nothing, except drinks to fuel the fun, and effort to keep awake after 3 am.
6. Los Escraches. One evening I took part in an ‘Escrache’, a word sadly invented in Argentina* and taken up elsewhere as a model of social action. It is a naming and shaming process originally aimed at torturers and army officers from the 1970s who walked around with impunity after being amnestied. First there is a march sticking up posters and graffiti with the victim’s face, then nearer his/her house placards are hung on traffic lights giving his address and alleged crimes. “Si no hay Justicia, hay Escrache” is the slogan. Our ‘victim’ was Judge Wagner Gustavo Mitchell who then had allegedly been party to the appropriation of babies born in captivity, and now is obstructing the request to obtain DNA from the children of the owner of the Clarín newspaper group, suspected to adopting stolen babies. The ‘Escraching’ was called by HIJOS, the organization of the children of mothers murdered in jail after giving birth. When we got there, they chanted for a few hours in the street but the judge’s house itself was cordoned off. Talking to the organizers is a real eye opener. Another good history lesson.
Cost? Nothing, but if there is trouble you might be tear gassed.
*Not from the English ‘scratch’ as you might think but from ‘scracciare’ Italian for to spit
7. St Patrick's day lives large in BA. Argentina being a country of immigrants, BA is packed with Community Associations who celebrate their ancestors’ countries national days and religious festivals etc. 17th March is St Patrick’s Day, and I stumbled into large-scale Irish merrymaking at the end of my road in the central Plaza San Martín, traditional home to the Patricios regiment. Lots of Irish-Argentines in leprechaun hats, Gaelic dancing and singing, bagpipes, and free Guinness (possibly the reason for the big crowd Irish and non-Irish)
Cost: nothing, except for putting up with a bit pompous speechifying although being Irish it wasn’t even that pompous.
8. Tango is huge business in BA! Watching, listening, learning, do-it-yourself at milongas. Shows for tourists can be fiendishly expensive, but you don’t have to spend fortunes on great tango. A friend invited me to what he said was “the best in BA.” Since he was the drummer in a well known rock band, I thought he should know. But I didn’t expect to be quite so blown away. “Fernandez Fierro” play every Wednesday in El Caff, a kind of shed near the wholesale food market, which they run as a coop. They are twelve young funky guys in black playing acoustic instruments: five bandoneons seated in the front, five violins standing at the back, a double bass, a cello, a piano and a cantor. They play their own arrangements of traditional tangos in the steps of the 1950s maestros and their own vanguard compositions. The power of the tango in sync with the dramatic light show made my hair stand on end. Tango players can be quite sedate but this was physical and muscular. Check them out at www.caff.com.ar
Cost? Nothing... because I was invited. But it’s only a couple of quid for a mesmeric show plus drinks and good empanadas.
So, back to the safe and expensive debate.
Safe? People will tell you horrendous stories and no doubt they are true. But for visitors, having a lot of people around is safer than having no one. So, I never felt unsafe coming out of the cinema at 1.30 am and walking ten blocks home. There are not many cities you can say that of.
Expensive? As I hope I’ve shown, you can do a lot of interesting things for free, or not much. And although flash hotels and even boutique hotels can be mega expensive, lots of Porteños have been forced to rent out rooms in nice houses and that can be good fun. For example, I used to always stay with a well-off friend near the Plaza San Martín. I still stay with her but now that she is on her uppers because of the 2000 financial collapse I pay her rent for a very nice room with a balcony and breakfast. She charges US$100 per week which is hardly a fortune, and has a wealth of advice to give you on absolutely everything. Check out Craigs List BA
P.S. If you want something really interesting to do, volunteer with a friend of mine who founded the BA homeless newspaper Hecho en BsAs (modelled on the Big Issue). That is both worthy stuff and a real an eye opener
P.P.S Does anyone else have any good ‘free thing’ to do in any other Latin American cities? Let us know.
