Perhaps I’m being a tad harsh, but Sāo Paulo is not the most attractive of places I’ve been to, with so far only a scattering of architectural standouts, not that many noteable landmarks and not yet any sense of centre. But certainly endless (and I mean endless) streets of concrete and glass sameness….
República de La Boca
La Boca, the working-class barrio south of San Telmo is of course home to La Bombonera and the infamous Boca Juniors soccer team. You may have read previous posts from our time here in November when La Boca played (or tried to play) its arch-rival River, in the Copa Libertadores final that never was. Well,…
Across the wide brown Rio Plata
We nipped across the wide brown Rio Plata on Tuesday for lunch in Colonia in Uruguay – a day return, as it’s just 1 hour and 141ks on the Colonia Express ‘wave piercer’. I just read that the Plata is incredibly shallow, barely 4 metres in depth at the point of crossing and 25…
Sunday in San Telmo
Every Sunday the San Telmo market springs into life and local treasures and trinkets from pretty much every decade over the past 150 years are out on show. This market has a particularly eclectic and, at first glance, bewildering assortment of objects stacked high and deep – as you can see from the photos. So,…
El Rey y La Reina
On our morning walk through the city we stumbled upon a rather grand ceremony taking place over at Plaza San Martin with colourful mounted grenadiers, in full-on royal anthem mode circling the imposing monument to General Jose de San Martin, one of Argentina’s national heroes and liberator of South America. We couldn’t make out what…
And then there were the three amigos…
Ants’ brother Guy has joined us in BA for our last week to help ease the pain of our departure from this incredible city on Friday. All up we’ve spent four wonderful months here and have really fallen for this ‘Paris of the South’, its charming friendly people, its eclectic impressive architecture, its seductive music,…
Kick Off
My morning walk over to San Nicolás, the elegant mostly residential district that lies behind the Teatro Colón and the other side of the vast Avenida 9th de Julio has become somewhat of a kick-off place for the many, almost daily manifestationes here in BA. As I confidently strode down Callao (pronounced here Ca-zhow) I walked…
Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes
The Palace of Flowing Waters (built in 1894) is an extravagantly grand water pumping station occupying an entire city block over on Córdoba and rather reminiscent of say The Natural History Museum or even St Pancras Station in London. The building’s Swedish engineer and Norwegian architect had a French renaissance palace in mind when they…
Meet me under the Ombú tree
“They say that sorrow and at last ruin comes upon the house on whose roof the shadow of the Ombú tree falls; and on that house which now is not, the shadow of this tree came every summer day when the sun was low. They say, too, that those who sit much in the…
The fall of the spreading Ombú tree
Enrique Rodríguez Larreta was a prominent Argentine writer, academic and prolific collector of early Hispanic art and Ambassador to France. We popped into his rather lovely Spanish-Colonial house today in Belgrano which was (surprise, surprise) gifted to him and his newly minted wife by his mother-in-law, the formidable (afore-mentioned) Mercedes Castellanos de Anchorena (of the…
Travels With My Ant 