[24th-30th November 2025]

It’s time to disembark from the MSC Fantasia for the final time.  We both feel that we’ve become almost institutionalised on the cruise.  Who’s going to deliver our breakfast in the morning, look after us in the restaurant at lunch and dinner, do our laundry and deliver it back folded the next day? Panic begins to set in. The cruise has been really excellent – the only disappointment is that we’ve seen lots of frigate birds on the way south from Barcelona, and absolutely nothing else.  No dolphins, no whales, not a seal in sight, not even a turtle or two.  This despite staring at the waves from our balcony for long periods of time. Never mind, maybe next time.

Buenos Aires awaits, after a long queuing experience before leaving the luggage collection hanger. Our first attempt at using Cabify, an Uber-like taxi service, works well.  We are delivered to a very swish and cool apartment block in the Recoleta district. As I’m unpacking, Fiona calls me to come out onto the balcony, to be met with a fabulous view of the famous Recoleta Cemetery spread out below us.  As we have lunch in a street restaurant, a young couple dance the tango outside the place next door.  As we are to discover, tango buskers are a common sight in some parts of the city.

In the evening, we stray only as far as the Winston Club, across the road from our apartment.  All of the male staff wear flat caps, one feature of an attempted British feel.  The Argentinian tapas, washed down with Malbec, must be good – we return three more times during our stay. They certainly have a quirky way of running a bar restaurant, including never getting the bill right – sometimes in our favour, sometimes in theirs, but it all breaks about even in the end.  The cool jazz is ever present and the speakeasy style ambience is obviously popular – it’s always busy.

Apparently, they had some bloke from North Berwick in the bar a couple of weeks ago, but they had to throw him out for misbehaving.  You can take the boy out of Darroch …. just kidding, Steve!

Frequenting Winston gives us the opportunity to observe that Buenos Aires is full of beautiful young people, some of whom seem to visit the bar on first or subsequent dates.  We do begin to feel that we are perhaps spoiling the scenery a bit, but it doesn’t bother us enough to stop us going back!

Buenos Aires is a vast city.  Apparently around 4 million folk commute into the city each working day. On our first full day, we take the city bus tour, which lasts 3.5 hours in its entirety, to orientate ourselves.

The bus gives us a taste of the size of the city and the layout of some of the more affluent districts, with broad boulevards apparently influenced by Haussmann’s Paris.  It’s noticeable how much land is given over to large and attractive parks that are obviously popular leisure spots – Buenos Aires’ equivalent of Rio’s beaches – with their ever-present huge jacaranda trees, currently in full light blue bloom, and noisy exotic birds flying back and forth.

The tour affords, amongst other things, an excellent view of the River Plate Stadium and our first opportunity to see La Boca barrio, including La Bombonera, the home of Boca Juniors. We stop for lunch down beside the river at Puente de la Mujer, on the new riverside walk/cycleway facing the skyscrapers of the business district, where we have our first Argentinian steaks.  Unfortunately, mine isn’t very good, which is an unexpected turn of events.

Next day, we get a taxi to take us from affluent Recoleta to much less well off La Boca.  It turns out to be a good cab to be using to arrive in this rough and raucous barrio – the car looks like it has hit something quite hard, quite recently.  The stadium has three steep sides, the ends still complete with traditional standing terraces and crush barriers.  The fourth side, formerly the “flat” side, has now been filled with a wall of corporate hospitality suites, no doubt well beyond the pocket of local fans.

Boca Juniors home is known as La Bombonera (the chocolate box), apparently because its steep-sided construction reminds locals of a box of chocolates. Coincidentally, it occurs to me that we often refer to Tynecastle as the Chocolate Box too. Perhaps for different reasons, however.

The stadium museum, La Perla – the bar where we have lunch – and the barrio in general are colourful tributes to three beloved deities:  The Pope, Eva Peron (Evita), and Diego Maradonna, a local and national hero whose legend lives on. It would appear that whilst the other two individuals are hugely revered, Maradona is actually regarded as God.  Many of us in Scotland fondly remember the Hand of God in Argentina’s 1986 World Cup win against England.

An entire wall is dedicated to images of Diego in the museum, and murals, statues, framed paintings, and endless graffiti, make his presence ubiquitous in the barrio and in peoples’ hearts, even some time after his untimely passing.  These people take their religion, their politics, and above all their football, very seriously indeed.

Whilst we are in La Boca, we visit the colourful streets of the Caminito.  The area is now a city supported centre for arts and tourism and is thronged, and so reasonably safe, apart from the potential for pickpocketing.  We feel that Caminito is now a real tourist trap – worth a visit but probably only a short one.  Moving away from the crowds into the much quieter streets of run-down buildings and favela-like corrugated metal dwellings in La Boca would seem, on our observations at least, to be unwise, no matter what some guide books will tell you.

One of Fiona’s long-standing ambitions is to take in a tango performance in Buenos Aires.  We spend some time choosing which one to book, as many are large set piece shows and really quite expensive.  We settle on the Secret Underground Tango Society, and head for the Palermo barrio at the allotted time.  The cab drops us on a street corner which features nothing that looks like a tango club.

We mill about briefly, and spot the correct street number on a plain building. The conversation then goes like this:

Me: “There’s a man over there waving at us.  I think that’s the place.”
Fi: “Well, they could do with putting a big sign up so people can find it.”
Me: “Well, it wouldn’t really be very secret or underground then, would it?”
Fi: “You’ve got a point there.

”Despite the fact that the only performance we could book starts at 4:40pm, when we enter the venue, the company has shuttered all the windows and created the ambience of a dark, atmospheric club at night, with candles on tables, and a capacity audience of only about 30 people. The musicians comprise a female singer, a male pianist, and a male concertina player.  All three are sensational.

Both the male and female dancer are small and slim, and they mesh together seamlessly as partners.  A bit like flamenco, the dance is sensual rather than overtly sexual. The dancers support and guide each other with the minimum of contact, though they may at times appear to be welded together.  Eye contact is hugely important in the fast-paced and complicated routines they perform.  The choreographer makes a guest appearance at one point, and she too is an excellent dancer. 

The whole company chats to the audience, individually and collectively, before and after the show, and they seem to genuinely care that the audience enjoys and appreciates their performance.  What a wonderful (early) evening – I think we chose well.

Next up is a visit to the amazing Recoleta Cemetery, which we can see into every day, but we haven’t yet entered.  Eva Peron’s, rather modest, family mausoleum is a big attraction, but still the place is by no means mobbed.  We spend a couple of hours wandering the “streets” flanked by all manner of tombs, some modest, some impressively opulent, which mark the resting places of Buenos Aires’ great and good.  Fiona describes it as “the Dean Cemetery on speed.” We decide to come back for a second instalment the next day.

Unfortunately, next day the great weather breaks, turning a bit cold and raining heavily all day.  We decide to go to see the exhibitions at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, taking a taxi the short distance from our apartment. However, about 400,000 other people appear to have had the same idea.  Although the gallery has a large empty indoor space at the entrance, the crowd are made to queue, snaking back along the road for about 100 metres, in the pouring rain.  We have no brollies or rain wear, so we order another cab and go back home – one of the few times things haven’t worked out on the trip so far.

We can’t even go up to our apartment block’s rooftop pool, but at least we managed a couple of previous visits in the late afternoon sunshine.  We hang about our very Instagrammable apartment most of the day, commenting on the fact that this, and similar apartments we’ve stayed in in various places, look great but are owned by people who’ve obviously never lived in them, hence the shower that always floods the bathroom floor, the lack of crockery, the cheap kettle and toaster, and the need to use the single teaspoon in relay.

The weekend seems to start on Thursday evening, with bands, singing and carousing right through the night until around 6:00am in the square below our apartment.  We discover that someone has left one of the French windows in the bedroom a bit open behind the heavy curtains. After that’s firmly shut, the noise abates a bit on subsequent nights, but these folk definitely know how to party!

Red meat-heavy Argentinian food gets a bit overwhelming quite quickly, and we prefer the tapas on offer at the Winston Club, which becomes our local during our six nights in Recoleta.

We feel hugely privileged to have fulfilled our ambition of visiting this amazing city and soaking up its cultures of football and tango, plus a great deal of Malbec.

My dozen favourite images from our stay in Buenos Aires are included in the gallery below. Click on a thumbnail to see a bigger image. If you’re using a mobile phone, turn your screen sideways to see the bigger image to best effect.

Image Gallery