Argentina (Buenos Aires)

Plaza San Martin and Retiro

If Florida has a rather humble beginning just off Plaza de Mayo, it ends in style in the chic environs of Avenida Santa Fe and Plaza San Martín, one of Buenos Aires’ lushest squares, extravagantly planted with palms, acacias and jacarandas (which have a wonderful blueish-mauve blossom in November) by Carlos Thays, who also designed the parks of Palermo. The Plaza’s aspiring centrepiece, the monument to San Martín, has a tough job holding its own against the Plaza’s magnificent gomero (rubber tree) whose weighty branches are propped like the fingers of a great gnarled hand guarding the generations of office workers and courting couples who have sat in its shade.
On the lower reaches of the Plaza stands the city’s monument to those killed in the Malvinas War. Its location could hardly be more poignant since on the other side of Avenida del Libertador which flanks the bottom of the Plaza, you will see the Torre Monumental, popularly known as the "Torre de los Ingleses". Standing in front of Retiro train station, the tower was donated to the nation by the British community to mark 100 years of independence in 1910. It used to share the square with a statue to Lord George Canning until the latter got unceremoniously chucked in the River Plate during the Malvinas War. In 1994 the bronze statue was fished out again and moved further up the road.