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Buenos Aires RemembrancesIf you are visiting Iguassu Falls, Buenos Aires most probably will be your hub to the Falls -or should be- considering the attractiveness of the capital city of Argentina.
So here I go… with my recollections of Buenos Aires under my hat that are as scarce as anybody who has lived there for only 20 years -almost nothing- compared to the nearly five centuries of history of this city whose full name is "Nuestra Señora Santa María de los Buenos Aires" which could be translated to "Our Lady Saint Mary of the Good Winds".
So, I will introduce you to this beautiful Lady and dear friend of mine and as I do we will take a virtual walk to places, things and people of her present and her past, trying not to annoy her with too many indiscretions.
When Spain and Portugal agreed to divide the world between them with the blessing of the Pope in the Treaty of Tordesillas signed in 1494 the fate of Buenos Aires was unknowingly signed. It's interesting how the "City of the Fair Winds" was born and it evolved into one of the largest metropolis of the world. This is a story I tell you about in my Buenos Aires Foundation page.
The Port
Buenos Aires inhabitants call themselves simply "Porteños" or port-people and that's because the port of Buenos Aires has always been its heart and soul, the main gateway to Argentina's exports and imports and most importantly, the entrance door to immigration waves that gave shape to Buenos Aires unique personality. Since Buenos Aires is a port city we should first visit Puerto Madero, the former port now turned into a high-end neighborhood and one of the city's most important attractions. I tell you about this in my Buenos Aires Puerto Madero page.
A City of Immigrants
Many like this man arrived to Buenos Aires with nothing else than their luggage, weird looking clothes and big expectations of starting a new life in the America's. All brought their cultural inheritance with them transforming Buenos Aires into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Don't miss reading my Buenos Aires immigrants page where I tell some interesting real immigrant stories, short samples of millions of untold ones hidden in the memory of Buenos Aires presently 13 million inhabitants, all of whom are immigrants or their descendants.
As a child of Buenos Aires I should say I had the privilege of living there since I was 3. But my memories of the place really started in 1969 when I was 11 and my father landed a job that brought us back to the "Reina del Plata" or Queen of the River Plate -as she is called- after a six year exile in Lima, Perú. We settled in "Barrio Norte" a middle-high class elegant neighborhood crammed with 12 story residential buildings and more than 100,000 people per square kilometer… yes, that's how powerful a magnet Buenos Aires can be to people. We first lived in Arenales and Uruguay streets but then moved to the even more elegant 1335 of Juncal Street that runs down a slope to Retiro Square.
As a kid I became fascinated with many common aspects of the urban life in Buenos Aires that were a new experience to me like living in "high-rise" apartment buildings, using kitchen stoves and water heating devices called "calefón" that burn natural gas pumped though pipes all the way from Argentina's Patagonia or using the noisy elevators with hand opened slide doors that most buildings were equipped with then.
One of my favorite pastimes was hanging out in our home balcony on the 3rd floor… a strategic place from where I could stare unnoticed the never ending traffic below and throw my paper airplanes to see them glide down to the street or crash against a racing "colectivo" (that's how public buses are called here).
Buenos Aires on the Move
Public transportation is essential in any large city and Porteños make an intensive use of it. Millions of them commute between the suburbs and downtown for work every day, a minority uses their cars –enough to congest the city- but the rest rely on the public system, mainly buses (called "colectivo" or "bondi"), the metro (called "subte") and commuter train services that transport the crowds from the north, south and western outskirts of the city.
I recall how impressed I was when a kid to see the spectacle of Buenos Aires during rush hours. Buenos Aires is certainly one of the busiest cities in the world and as a school boy going to classes I was part of the moving masses of this city.
Thousands of people on the move without noticing each other like automatons heading to a thousand untold destinations. People hurriedly walking and crossing in all directions, stepping into a bus or taxi or emerging like ants from the subway. These were my first impressions of what's like living in the great city. The different kinds of public transportation Buenos Aires has –or had- not only are a means to move people, they make an essential part of the city's façade, its history and personality. Buenos Aires wouldn't be what it is without its black and yellow taxi cabs, the colectivos, the subte and trains. Using them is a great way to discover Buenos Aires in its intimate dimension.
One of my favorite transport systems are trains. I remember myself watching the trains pass by for hours from my Aunt Elvira's home in Floresta neighborhood when I was a small boy and we visited her on Sundays; I was somehow hypnotized by them.
Trains were the main transport system of Argentina until the 1950's and still provide a very important commuter service today. There's quite a story behind them and some interesting travel options for tourists that I tell you about in my Buenos Aires Trains page.
Another of my favorites is the subway here called "subte" an abbreviation of the word "subterránneo" that literally means underground. In my opinion today this is the best public transport system of the city but, besides that, using the subway is a way to discover a whole different world living under Buenos Aires streets that I tell you about in my Buenos Aires Metro page.
We need to move to Buenos Aires past to discover what used to be the most important public transport until the beginnings of the 1960's, of course I'm talking about the tramway. Tramways were an inseparable part of the city environment for nearly 100 years.
Thanks to Porteños concern to preserve this piece of Buenos Aires history you can still enjoy a tramway trip and see how it feels to move around in one today. I tell you about this in my
Buenos Aires Tramways page.
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