#13 — What I Learned in Argentina (Return to Buenos Aires and Palermo)
After eleven days, four hotels, and a slow drift west into wine country, we turned around and flew back to where the trip started.
#13 — What I Learned in Argentina (Return to Buenos Aires and Palermo)
After eleven days, four hotels, and a slow drift west into wine country, we turned around and flew back to where the trip started.
We wanted to experience the city “like locals” and slow down…
Goodby Mendoza
Mendoza had been the destination I was most unsure about going in and the place I was most reluctant to leave. But Buenos Aires was always going to bookend this trip, and there’s a particular comfort in returning to a city you’ve already learned to read a little. We knew the airport. We knew the hotel. We knew which way the neighborhood faced. The unknown part of Argentina was behind us now.
The Flight Back
The hop from Mendoza to Buenos Aires is the kind of travel day that doesn’t make for much of a story, which is exactly why it earns its place — it’s the connective tissue. Aerolíneas Argentinas AR 1409, out of Mendoza’s El Plumerillo just before 11, into Aeroparque Jorge Newbery a little after noon. Seats 1C and 1D. Wheels down right on the Río de la Plata.
The scale of that river!
Back at Mio
We checked back into Mio Buenos Aires by mid-afternoon, the same boutique hotel in Recoleta we’d started the trip in, steps from the cemetery. This time it was a Junior Suite for four nights, with a guaranteed late checkout on our last day.
There’s a pleasure in coming back to a hotel you already know.
An Afternoon in Recoleta
Lunch was at Café La Biela, and the place has a backstory worth knowing. It opened in 1850 as a small sidewalk café, named for the narrow strip of pavement it sat on, then became the “Aero Bar” for the civil pilots’ association that kept an office nearby. The name it carries now is pure motor racing: biela is the Spanish word for a connecting rod, and as the story goes, a driver once coasted to a dead stop at this very corner with a melted one. By the 1950s, when Buenos Aires was hosting Formula One, La Biela had become the café where the drivers actually sat — Juan Manuel Fangio, the five-time world champion, and the rest of the racing crowd — and it never let go of that identity. There’s a statue of the driver Oscar “the Eaglet” Gálvez out front to prove the point.
Love the Memorabilia and Motoring History at Café La Biela
You can see it the second you sit down. The chairs have a connecting rod cut into the backrest. The walls are black-and-white photos of drivers in fire suits, radiator grilles, lamps, horns — one signed photo reads “Para los amigos de La Biela.” It sits under an enormous rubber tree across from the cemetery, and on the racing history alone it earns the stop.
The honest part: the drinks were great, the food is a tourist trap. You’re paying Recoleta-terrace prices for café standards that are fine and no better. Come for a coffee or a cocktail and the walls, not for the kitchen.
Out for a Stroll in the Square
Then we walked up Libertador to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes — Argentina’s national art museum, and free to walk into, which still surprises me for a collection this good. There’s a cast of Rodin’s The Kiss, a room of French Impressionists, and the Argentine galleries where I stopped longest: Jorge Bermúdez, and Xul Solar’s small, strange, brilliant watercolors. An hour and change, no rush.
They had one Diego Rivera and a rumored Frida Kahlo, only to find out it was traveling and on loan.
Outside, the most Buenos Aires thing of the day: a paseaperros — a professional dog-walker — crossing the street with ten dogs fanned out on leashes, all of them somehow in step.
I have never seen dogs so behaved!
We didn’t even leave the building for dinner. We ate downstairs at Verdot, Mio’s wine bar — appetizers, a couple of custom cocktails, one built on a Chola Fernet del Altiplano, the craft fernet out of Jujuy. After a travel day and an afternoon on foot, staying put in a hotel we already knew was exactly the point of coming back.
Local Fernet and it was Excellent!
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