An art lover’s guide to Buenos Aires

On the other side of the street from Barro is Fundación Larivière, a repository of 20th-century Latin American photography.

Finally, no trip to La Boca is complete without visiting the Benito Quinquela Martin Museum, dedicated to the eponymous mid-20th-century painter. A lifelong denizen of this barrio, Quinquela took port life as his subject, evocatively capturing the bustle of the ships and the hardworking dockhands attending them. ‘La Boca is my office, my refuge and my model’ he said.

San Telmo

Another barrio with a fascinating past is San Telmo. Centrally located, this used to be home to Buenos Aires’s rich and powerful, who built themselves large mansions — only for an outbreak of yellow fever in 1871 to send them fleeing to the city’s north. Many of the houses were subsequently converted into tenements, into which poorer citizens and immigrants moved. The area developed a bohemian air, which still can be felt today as you walk its cobblestone streets and have a coffee in one of its old-school bares notables.

MAMBA occupies a converted cigarette factory and is gearing up for its 70th anniversary in 2026. Right next door is the Museum of Contemporary Art in Buenos Aires (MACBA), a private museum founded by the financier-collector Aldo Rubino and focused primarily on geometric abstraction.

San Telmo also has a flourishing gallery scene. ‘There’s a circuit of contemporary art spaces one can visit, all of them within a few blocks of each other,’ says Federico Curutchet, the co-director of one such space, W—gallery. ‘Each gallery has something to offer individually, but we complement one another well too.’