Buenos Aıres

Buenos Aires once billed itself the Paris of South America, with wide avenidas and Belle Époque facades paid for by an immigration boom. Ask a porteño instead – the word locals use for themselves, after the port that built this city – and you’ll hear about tango. It was born in dockside bars, not ballrooms, a dance that holds strict embrace and total improvisation in the same breath, and it was Paris, eventually, that borrowed it back.

La Boca’s Caminito alley will sell tango right back to you, souvenir-sized, cover charge included.

VoiceMap’s self-guided audio tours give the monuments their due, then take you past them. Stand where the Cabildo’s colonial walls still face Casa Rosada’s pink-washed front. Cross into Puerto Madero next, where the streets carry women’s names almost nowhere else in the city does – Julieta Lanteri among them, the first woman to vote in Latin America – ending at a bridge cast mid-tango step. Save an afternoon, too, for the Carlos Thays Botanical Garden, where Argentina’s mate obsession began beside a Beethoven-inspired statue.

You lead. We’ll follow.