Buenos Aires is largely regarded as the best entrée city to South America for Americans, especially those of European descent. There’s a familiarity here for that group that would be more difficult to find in, say, Lima or La Paz. As an American first-timer to the country, I had to agree. Walking around the city and its distinctive neighborhoods—heavily influenced by European immigrants—is not entirely foreign, and utterly delightful (except for all those narrow and broken sidewalks). All around me, glorious structures from the city’s belle époque—its churches and theaters and municipal buildings—still stand proudly (and, in some cases, in need of a little TLC). Read about the top five buildings in Buenos Aires, Argentina >
Tag Archives: Argentina
Bank on It
On a daily basis, there’s little need to go into a bank anymore. You can do practically everything online, and, when you need cash, you just stop at an ATM. There’s even less of a need when you’re on vacation. However, some of the most beautiful buildings I’ve been to are banks, and they deserve some special attention. If you want to be impressed by architectural beauty, visiting them is simply money in the bank. Read about the top five bank buildings >
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Music in the Sky: The World’s Best Bell Towers
I’ve had the opportunity to ring the bells at the Church of St. Anne Shandon in Cork, Ireland, and at the Church of the Assumption on an island in Lake Bled, Slovenia. But, for the most part, my experiences with bell towers have been restricted to admiring their vertical beauty and listening to their heavenly music, and that’s rewarding enough. No matter their purpose, from cheerful chimes on college campuses to somber tolling marking a funeral, bell towers make for striking exclamation points in a cityscape. Read about the top five bell towers >
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A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose, But Some Places Grow Them Better
Garden cultivation of roses began several millennia ago, starting way back in Babylon, ancient China, and the Roman Empire. Long admired for their color, their fragrance, and their beauty (some royalty used them as legal tender in the 17th century), the world’s most popular flower has achieved fame not only in horticultural circles, but also in song (“Yellow Rose of Texas”; “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”), war (The War of the Roses), adages (“bed of roses”; “I never promised you a rose garden”), and cinema (The Rose; The Rose Tattoo). This international symbol of love is tended to in dedicated gardens around the world, some of which have truly perfected the art. Read about the world’s top five rose gardens >
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Fourteen Stops Around a Christian Church
One of the religious highlights of the Lenten season is walking the Stations of the Cross. Christians can follow Jesus’ last hours on earth via 14 stations, from His condemnation to death through His march to Calvary and ultimately His body being placed in the tomb. In Christian churches around the world, these images line the walls, often with seven on one side of the church and seven on the other. Regardless of their simplicity or complexity, they are all works of art. Read about the world’s best Stations of the Cross >
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Flirting With Aconcagua
The tallest mountain in both the Western and Southern hemispheres is the jewel of a gorgeous provincial park. Rising above its fellow Andes to a height of nearly 23,000’, Mt. Aconcagua straddles the Argentina-Chile border. Although I had no intention of scaling to its summit, I was keen to experience the dramatic and strikingly beautiful approach toward its base. Read more about it >
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Argentina’s Most Beautiful Churches
Four intranational flights in Argentina took me from Buenos Aires to Puerto Iguazú to Salta to Mendoza and back to the capital. It was a whirlwind trip around the northern part of the country during which I hiked around one of the world’s top waterfalls and around the tallest mountain in the Americas, experienced both Latin and Native American cultures, ate llama cutlets and sucked on coca leaves to stave off altitude sickness, and roamed through some of the country’s best cities, filled with beautiful (and often crumbling) architecture, including fantastic houses of worship. Read about the top five churches in Argentina >
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Beloved by All: 1822 –
Some of the world’s best cemeteries—Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York; Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York; and Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri—are grand rural cemeteries, filled with curving roads, hills, trees, flowering shrubs, and ponds. But one of them, Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina, differs completely from the rest—an urban, densely packed burial ground founded in 1822 and crammed with mausoleums and monuments along a city-like grid pattern. It looks like a scale model of Buenos Aires itself, and it’s the final resting place of dozens of influential Argentinians, including one who doesn’t want us to cry for her. Read more about it >
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BA in BA: Boutique Accommodations in Buenos Aires
An accommodation in the heart of Buenos Aires, Argentina, that offers heart-stopping ham omelets, free tango lessons, and the refinement of the Old World transported to the New World — that’s what Rooney’s Boutique Hotel promises you. All of that means you’ll be staying at one of the most atmospheric hotels in this rich and complex city. Read more about it >
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Shelf Life: The World’s Best Bookstores
When you’re confined to your home for any reason, from a three-day cold that has you feeling haggard to a yearlong global pandemic that has wrecked every aspect of your life and has completely enervated you, you need a panacea to prevent insanity. From cobbling together inventive workout routines with household items to starring in your own YouTube videos to whipping up something completely new in the kitchen, we’ve all found methods to amuse ourselves. (Binge-watching brainless reality shows doesn’t cut it.) Of course, the old standby — curling up with a good book—rises to the top of the ways to escape your situation and enter a world far-removed from your own. And finding a unique brick-and-mortar bookstore to expand your library with anything from the definitive biography of an obscure artist to a demotic novel for a beach read is where it all begins (sorry, Amazon). Read about my top five bookstores >
Stephen Travels 