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Few cities wear their personality as openly as Buenos Aires. The Argentine capital sits on the western bank of the Río de la Plata, one of the widest river estuaries on earth, and that geography has always shaped the city's sense of itself: a port that absorbed waves of Italian, Spanish, and Eastern European immigrants through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, layering their influences onto a Spanish colonial foundation until something entirely its own emerged. The result is a city of grand European-style boulevards and crumbling belle-époque facades, of neighbourhood corner cafes where a coffee can last an afternoon, and of a musical tradition, the tango, that began in the working-class conventillos of La Boca and San Telmo before conquering the world.

San Telmo is where many first-time visitors find their footing. Its cobbled streets, antique markets, and colonial architecture carry a weight of history that the more polished northern barrios do not, and it is here that tango feels least like a performance and most like a living habit. A few kilometres north, Recoleta announces a different register entirely: the famous cemetery where Eva Perón is buried among elaborate family mausoleums draws visitors from across the world, and the surrounding streets of French-influenced mansions and pavement cafes make the neighbourhood one of the most architecturally coherent in South America. Palermo, sprawling and loosely defined, absorbs the energy that neither of those places quite contains, with its parks, design shops, and restaurant density that has made it a reference point for the city's contemporary food culture.