day 71_Buenos Aires_first impressions

Back on the road… This is my first day in Buenos Aires and my first day of the Winchester travels overall. So far, I really like the city. It feels very European, which I’m not surprised, but it’s much more heterogeneous. Today I mostly walked through Palermo and Recoleta, which are considered one of the nicest areas in the city (and of course the most visited by tourists). As I mentioned, the city fabric is more heterogeneous than a typical European city. Eight-twelve story apartment buildings are intermixed with one-two story buildings with a more colonial flare, which results in a great visual variability and brings a lot of energy to the streetscape. Streets are lined with trees and parked cars, retail space typically occupies the first floor of the buildings, and graffiti is covering almost all surfaces within human reach.

However, despite the heterogeneity in street section and elevation, the city could not be more homogeneous in plan. Everything is laid out on a shifted grid (which of course makes the navigation through the city very easy). But I was struck by the uniformity of urban fabric when arriving on the plane late at night. Buenos Aires looked like a glowing checkered table cloth, nicely laid out, covering an incredibly flat and expansive area at the edge of Rio de la Plata basin - one of the largest river basins in the world.