Buenos Aires; Belgrano, Recoleta, Palermo, La Boca

Buenos Aires is gigantic. You can walk for hours and never leave one neighborhood, drive for a day and never leave the city. You get a sense of size if you take a cab from Belgrano to La Boca. Size, and scale of the infrastructure. Every avenue is a vista of trees and parks. Every subway stop a museum. It’s beautiful, and rich with history and culture.

Buenos Aires is steeped, and marked, in dark, recent history as well. In the 1970s the country’s military took over the government, and the entire country, particularly Buenos Aires, was turned upside down. To this day, there are over 30,000 missing persons from this era.

Still, today you can feel the effects from this period; the country never fully recovered financially and residents are used to runs on banks. Most ATMs go down during the day and there are lines around the block at most. To Westerners, it’s scary to think you might not be able to get access to cash 24/7.

Still, it’s a fantastic city to visit. One thing we discovered in Buenos Aires that we have searched out and found since in other Latin American countries is Puertos Cerrados, meaning “Closed Doors.” These are chefs who entertain and cook in their own homes. Buenos Aires is the first Puertos Cerrados we attended, in the Recoleta neighborhood, and it was fantastic.