Buenos Aires Guide
Recoleta
For the last century, Recoleta has clung resolutely to the title of Buenos Aires' grandest barrio. Even today, although it no longer possesses the city's most expensive real estate – that honour falls to glossy Puerto Madero – it continues to exude timeless wealth: classical elegance and the latest fashions are flaunted in its streets, which are lined with European-style mansions, ornate Neoclassical facades and a plethora of lofty cupolas, noble statuary and fancy ironwork. For Porteños and visitors alike the barrio is intrinsically tied to the patrician Cementerio de la Recoleta, but there's certainly more to see here than the famous graveyard. Most of Recoleta's major sights – including the cemetery and its adjoining basilica, one of the capital's best-preserved colonial buildings – are squeezed into the streets northeast of Avenida Las Heras, a busy two-way thoroughfare that links verdant Plaza Vicente López, on the border with Retiro, with Plaza Italia in Palermo. Among these attractions are the country's richest assemblage of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fine art, a series of landscaped plazas dotted with some significant monuments (including a statue of Evita), the controversial national library and the startling Floralis Genérica, a giant metallic flower that opens and shuts.