Argentina
Buenos Aires (City)
First founded by Spanish aristocrat Pedro de Mendoza in 1536, Buenos Aires had a troublesome beginning. Plagued by hunger and under constant attack from the native Querandí Indians, the city’s early settlers were soon forced to flee upriver to Asunción, which had been founded by a section of Mendoza’s party in 1537. It was from here that Juan de Garay, some 40 years later, headed back down the River Paraná and, in 1580, successfully refounded the city.

Despite this slightly inauspicious start, Buenos Aires never really looked back. Progress during the colonial period and in the aftermath of Independence, declared in 1816, was slow but by the late nineteenth century, Buenos Aires was Latin America’s most dynamic and populous city, attracting staggering quantities of European immigrants. By 1929, the French architect Le Corbusier felt compelled to describe Argentina’s capital as "a gigantic agglomeration of insatiable energy".

Seventy years later, there may be more populous cities than Buenos Aires, but most of them have to accommodate their inhabitants in a smaller space. Surrounded by the seemingly infinite space of the pampa, the urban sprawl is checked only to the northeast, by the River Plate - an estuary whose great brown expanse is a watery extension of these flat and fertile lands. Modern Buenos Aires is home to a third of Argentina’s population of 33 million, and although for many the days of glory have gone, the capital continues to act as a magnet for economic migrants from the country’s poorer provinces as well as from neighbouring Latin American countries.

Despite its size, Buenos Aires has retained a human scale. Just a few blocks from the city centre you will find traditional barrios or "neighbourhoods" with cobbled streets and simple one-storeyed houses and bars, whose quiet corners have inspired tangos and the poems and short stories of Argentina’s greatest writer, Jorge Luis Borges. The most renowned barrio is San Telmo in the south of the city, which was once inhabited by the city’s elite, but they fled to the higher grounds of Barrio Norte after a yellow fever epidemic in 1871, thus establishing a precedent for the geographical division of wealth which persists to this day.

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Neutrally located in the centre and home to theatres, cafés and bookshops, Corrientes was once described as "the street that never sleeps". It’s an epithet that could now be applied to the city as a whole: Buenos Aires is one of the world’s great 24-hour cities and one of the few places in the world where you’ll find yourself with standing-room only on a bus in the small hours of a weekday morning. Whatever time you hit the streets of Buenos Aires, you’ll find porteños - as the city’s inhabitants are known (from puerto or "port") - in animated conversation over an espresso, in one of the city’s ubiquitous confiterías, or cafés.

A superficial acquaintance with the city might make you think of Paris, Rome or Madrid but Buenos Aires is also home to two of the world’s most unusual, and least European, landscapes. Just an hour from the British-built Retiro train station lie the fairy-tale islands and subtropical vegetation of the Paraná Delta and, within the city itself, no trip would be complete without a day in La Boca, the city’s famously colourful port district and perhaps the only neighbourhood in the world where it’s regarded as normal to paint houses, telegraph poles and trees in the colours of your local football team.