Its our first full day on the ground in Buenos Aires, Argentina! Rosie and The Operator are off to visit La Boca a working-class neighborhood with a cluster of the most famous attractions in Buenos Aires. Not only is this spot the number one tourist suburb in the city it is also one of the oldest neighborhoods and apparently one of the most dangerous….if you wander off the beaten track.
With our apartment hosts words of warning in our ears to ‘not carry anything we cannot afford to loose’, we set off from our apartment in San Telmo on the thirty minute walk to get to La Boca.
July is winter in Argentina yet the sky was bright blue, the sun low and the air crisp. It was a beautiful day, Rosie’s favorite kind of weather. Having arrived in the dark, the neighborhood had a whole new look this morning with the ominous shadows of night dispelled.
Walking through San Telmo the majority of the buildings in the neighborhood are crumbling grey stone of around a hundred and fifty year old vintage. The footpaths too are crumbly with loose tiles and cavernous holes. Shop fronts are still covered with grey roller doors and the ones that are open are busy accepting deliveries. The fruit and vege shops in the area are first to open and old school style, with a roller door as a front door. When the door is rolled up, the shop is open and its nice to see the bright colour of the produce livening up the street.
The nearer we get to La Boca the more colour is being injected into the surroundings. Graffiti is everywhere in this town. It ranges from the signatures of vandals to large scale entire walls and buildings covered in the paintings of street artists. There are almost no restrictions on where you can paint in this city, all you need is to gain consent from the property owner….if there is one that is and the property is not one of the many abandoned in the city. Hence, Buenos Aires is getting a real reputation for being a leader of street art in Argentina. Rosie and The Operator like to walk the cities we visit…and it is an added bonus if we stumble across great examples of art along the way.
Cruising along we see a lot of heavy vehicle trucks, none are modern big rigs, they are all survivors from the 50s/60s, mostly brightly painted and all with a name painted on the windscreen.
Before us, on the edge of La Boca, in all its gold and blue glory looms the giant football stadium La Bombonera, which literally translates to The Chocolate Box. This is the home ground of the football club Boca Juniors, which was founded in 1905 and is the most successful club in Argentina with its fan base numbering at 40% of the total Argentine population!
Hold on, its not just the stadium that is gold and blue the whole area is said Rosie as they turned a corner, it looked crazy! Shops selling club souvenirs line the street outside the stadium and life size figures of great Argentine and Boca players past and present stand in front of them.
This bar has a role call of famous (and infamous) Argentines….Diego Maradona heads the list and the Pope is a close second at the end of the line seeing as he is the newest addition. Che Guevara features heavily everywhere in town as the most recognizable claim to famer from Argentina.
Diego Maradona played for Boca in the 80s…only for one year….the club couldn’t afford to pay his wages as they were on the verge of bankruptcy so they on sold him to Barcelona for a record at the time of 7.3 million. He then returned in 1995 to play out his days till he retired in 1997. Pictures of the legend that is Maradona are plastered everywhere to inspire. He is still a hero in the nations eyes…and well, all that Hand of God rubbish and drug dealing…its very debatable here…but don’t do it.
Football here is bigger than religion…it is a fanatical cult, and with that level of following comes a craziness and violence that sadly goes hand in hand. Boca does not host any of the rivals fans on game day, the stadium is full of its own supporters. It is too dangerous for them to come here and too much trouble for the local police…once or twice the arriving rival players have been attacked by Boca fans!
The general public can’t buy tickets to any games….as they are all pre sold to club members who fill the whole stadium. On game day you can try to buy a ticket outside the stadium from a member or join a tour group which has already pre bought tix. These games are supposed to be epic and the season had just finished when Rosie and The Operator landed in town.
River Plate are the other big Buenos Aires football team and are Boca’s biggest rivals. They are a team from an upper class suburb on the other side of town and it is advised locally to NEVER wear their strip in La Boca for actual fear of bodily harm.
The rivalry between Boca & River is very intense as these are the two most popular teams in the country. Games between the two clubs are known as superclassicos…Boca just has the edge on wins over River Plate. Sometimes when these two teams play each other the threat of violence in the city has been too great so they shift the game to Europe and do not allow any supporters to travel there. The teams play for example in Spain to an empty stadium. Now that is crazy on a whole new level right?
Rival teams dub La Boca supporters Los Bosteros – the Manure Handlers….of which they are immensely proud, due to their mainly working class backgrounds in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.
The level of intensity over football here is immense…every boy in every park is kicking a ball around…hoping to be the next big player.
Past the Gold and Blue, on the corner of the street we see our first full tin clad building, we are now entering the heart of the barrio (neighborhood) of La Boca. This was the neighborhood where new immigrants first established themselves when they arrived in Buenos Aires.
The neighborhood derives its name from its location at ‘La Boca’ (the mouth) of the Mantanza River. This river port barrio was an obvious point for boats to come ashore and historians say the Spanish first landed in La Boca as early as 1536.
Mass settlement in La Boca began in 1830, with an influx of immigrants from Genoa, Italy. Coming from a port city themselves, it was natural for these Italians to settle along the Buenos Aires waterfront. There were so many Genoese in La Boca at that time that some say the name of the suburb is a spin-off on the name Boccadasse, a neighbourhood in Genoa which they came from.
The new arrivals constructed tenements made of scrap metal and painted the shacks with bright leftover paint to liven up the decrepit area and make it feel like home.
The tin is rusty, and probably not original anymore, some houses have patchworks of multiple colours. A cat suns itself in the window and in true feline fashion ignores our calls to look at the camera. Bunches of cables and wiring hang overhead in thick jumbled ropes and is a common theme through out the whole neighborhood.
Soon the Italians were joined by immigrants from Spain, France, England, Ireland, Eastern Europe and Greece and among others. Argentina has the second highest rate of immigrants that colonised its shore in the World (after the US). This cross-cultural mix gave birth to tango, although the term wouldn’t be coined until the end of the 1890’s. Factory and port workers would gather to dance in the central halls of the tenements and vie to grab the attention of the few women available at the time.
The one-time railway route which runs through La Boca from the port to the city is lined with the bright facades that make La Boca postcard perfect. The high chain link fence on either side of the tracks seems ominous…especially since the trains stopped running through here in the 1950s…but the colours were beautiful, the sky was blue and the smell of lunchtime BBQ was heavy in the air.
The centerpiece of La Boca is the world famous cobblestone strip of street, El Caminito, or little walkway. The buildings on this small strip of street are the colourful postcard images you see of Buenos Aires.
Named after a 1926 tango song, the short pedestrian lane features an outdoor fair where artists sell their many styled paintings of the street and tango life. Scantily clad tango dancers prance along the sidewalk trying to get you to either dance or have a photo taken with them.
Annoying selfie takers slither into your shots and preen and pout for a ridiculous amount of time while Rosie waits for a gap in the throng. This street is the only tourist crowd we have encountered so far, and it could be worse considering it is low season.
Souvenir shops line the adjacent streets, all in various states of unrepair, ruin and awesomeness. CCTV cameras are unusually thick on the ground for such a small area and police are subtly everywhere yet unobtrusive in the tourist zone.
La Bocca is buzzing, the outdoor terraces have their plastic winter shields rolled back and tables have been moved onto the cobble streets. The feeling is festive and good willed which Rosie puts down to the vibrant, upbeat surroundings and sunny winter day.
By the turn of the 19th century this area was the second most populated zone in Buenos Aires but the construction of a new port in Puerto Madero meant the shipping industry would move northward. As Argentina entered its golden era, residents moved further inland and La Boca began to decline. This period so gives it the edgy vibe it has become famous for, even with the areas revival in the 50s the transformation and restoration has been slow which means the new melds nicely with the old.
Rosie and The Operator are hungry, the charcoal and grilling meat scent in the air is overpowering and we are on the hunt for the perfect lunchtime asado! An asado is basically a lunchtime meat feast! Meat cuts, offal and sausages are all cooked on a parilla, BBQ, over wood coals. You order an asado and it comes to your table like a mini BBQ loaded with your selection of meats still sizzling away. Vegetables are an afterthought here in this country which has the highest amount of red meat consumption in the world!
Rosie and The Operator walked back to the train tracks and turned down a couple of alleys which apparently lead to the areas best BBQ in La Boca. Oh, yes, there is was, the BBQ out the front was loaded with meat and the garden out the back was full of tables and mainly locals enjoying the many delicious meaty offerings.
Rosie and The Operator were busy watching and looking, Rosie was keen to get the BBQ order under way. Hold on, The Operator cautions Rosie as she is about to order. The restaurant does not take credit cards he said, and the problem is…? asked Rosie. We normally carry enough cash as we realise it is the preferred form of payment in countries like this.
Well, said The Operator, considering we were going into an area we had been warned about I didn’t put much cash in my wallet….carry what you can afford to loose was the motto. Well, countered Rosie, I thought you would have carried enough for lunch!
So, like poor backpackers we counted what we had and looked at the menu for what we could afford…serious! Our lunch today consisted of Choripan – Chorizo sausage on a bread roll with lashings of free Chimchurri sauce. I kid you not! Our budget stretched to a one liter bottle of beer which we shared and then we scuttled off before our non existent tip could be discovered. Rosie must say though…that sausage was divine…check out her food blog at the end of our travels and Rosie will explain all of the delicous food we have eaten here in Buenos Aires.
Walking home, with a full belly from our budget lunch, Rosie is still snapping away at rusty house frontages and anything that catches her eye, it has been a fabulous day full of colour and overwhelming sights! What a great start to exploring Buenos Aires Rosie and The Operator have had the best day!
Tomorrow we are off to explore Recoleta Cemetery, The City of the Dead, smack bang in the middle of one of the cities most exclusive neighborhoods. We cannot wait for that either.
