Insider tips on Buenos Aires
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the beautiful wrought-iron market of San Telmo in Buenos Aires, British teacher and all-round Latin legend Stephen Melton has been telling me about the Argentinian capital – what to see, and what to watch out for.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the fall of February. |
| 0:10.0 | And I have the great treasurer being in Buenos Aires with Stephen Melton, history teacher Latin American legend, and he's very kindly brought me to St. Elmo Market |
| 0:24.1 | in one of the loveliest parts of the Cap Rock. And Stephen, I'd love to hear what your highlights of |
| 0:31.7 | Buenos Aires are. Highlights, it depends what sort of experience you want. Really, it's not a place for small children. |
| 0:39.2 | It's eating, it's drinking, it's walking around. There is cafe culture, which is sort of unusual |
| 0:44.1 | in some parts of the world, especially in some parts of Latin America. What you've got here is |
| 0:48.2 | amazing old buildings and one of the sides, you've got a lot of culture. There's opera, there's |
| 0:52.5 | music, it's tango, there's theatre, there's an awful lot going on, but also the food. Perhaps it's limited. |
| 0:59.0 | It's sort of meat, pastas, Italian style, Spanish style, but it's very, very, very good. |
| 1:04.0 | And it's very accessible. You can walk about the people are friendly. You're not going to get any sort of nasty looks. |
| 1:10.0 | You can really walk in many, |
| 1:11.4 | many parts of the city. It's flat. The weather's nice. It's worth a visit. But talk us through |
| 1:17.3 | some of the specific highlights, if you would see. So if you were planning a |
| 1:22.6 | 19 or a few days, what would you put on the list? Okay. If you're looking at three days, |
| 1:26.9 | you want to stay in town. Okay, you can stay in Recoleta, which is a very nice area. That's the path that became the rich area after about 18, 18, 18, 90, very pretty. From there, you can visit Palermo, you can come down to San Telmo, there's La Bocca, the mouth of the river. And what I would do definitely is spend a lot of time walking |
| 1:46.0 | to walk off all that meats and vegetables if you're into, if you're vegetarian. |
| 1:50.9 | I would try lots of red wine, lots of wine tasting. |
| 1:53.8 | The wine is incredible. |
| 1:55.3 | I would be looking at the Eificio Barolo, |
| 1:57.8 | which is a beautiful marble building near the Congress, |
| 2:00.6 | which shows Dante's |
| 2:01.6 | seven levels of hell dropping down. |
... |
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