Buenos Aires keeps its history close. This is a day spent moving through the layers of it — from the founding square where the republic declared itself, south through the oldest neighbourhood in the city, and then back downtown in the evening for tango performed in the basement of a building that once served as a lighthouse for ships on the Río de la Plata.
The Plaza de Mayo Circuit
Take the Subte Line D from Recoleta — the nearest station is Facultad de Medicina — to Catedral, which surfaces at the edge of Plaza de Mayo mid-morning. This is the civic and symbolic centre of Argentina — Juan de Garay laid out the original square when he refounded Buenos Aires in 1580, and for more than four centuries it has been the place where the country's decisive moments have played out in public. Coronations and revolutions, Peronist rallies and the silent circling of the Madres, the celebrations after the 1986 World Cup — all of it happened here.
At the centre of the square stands the Pirámide de Mayo, the first national monument in the city, built in 1811 to mark the first anniversary of the May Revolution, with the figure at the top representing Liberty — sculpted by French artist Joseph Dubourdieu and added during a redesign by Prilidiano Pueyrredón in 1856, with the original 1811 pyramid preserved inside. Around its base, look down at the painted white kerchiefs set into the pavement: these represent the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the group of mothers who gathered here from 1977 onward to demand information from the military government about their children who had disappeared during the Dirty War, and who still march every Thursday.