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What to see in Buenos Aires on foot
34 sights worth the detour, all walkable, all offline.
Coming soon on iOS — be first to walk Buenos Aires offline.
Buenos Aires is a city made for walking. This self-guided guide maps 34 of its sights worth the detour — landmarks, historic sites, museums and galleries and parks and gardens — the places locals point to and the tour buses skip, close enough to string into a single day on foot. Download the Buenos Aires pack in Voyage GO before you go and the whole route works offline: no roaming, no dead battery from a live map. Every monument, viewpoint and park you pass quietly fills your travel passport.
Landmarks15
- 1Mas Monumental Stadium85,018 seats on reclaimed Río de la Plata marshland — the largest stadium in South America, and the ground where a World Cup Final was played.
- 2La BomboneraThat chocolate-box shape doesn't just look strange — the unusual design gives the bowl its famously excellent acoustics.
- 3Oscar and Juan Gálvez Race TrackF1 cars once screamed through the third corner here at 305 km/h, flat out for 40 straight seconds — and the grandstands put you right on top of it.
- 4Palacio BaroloA 1923 tower mapped floor by floor onto Dante's Divine Comedy — hell at the base, purgatory in the middle, heaven at the top.
- 5Puerto MaderoSeven failed redevelopment plans across six decades, and now Buenos Aires's most expensive address — by a factor of two.
- 6Avenida 9 de JulioAt 110 metres wide, this is the widest avenue on earth — and standing at one kerb, the far side genuinely looks far away.
- 7Obelisco de Buenos AiresBuilt by 157 workers in 31 days — and the city voted to demolish it just three years later.
- 8Palace of the Argentine National CongressThe stone outside marks Kilometre Zero — the point every Argentine highway is measured from.
- 9Puente de la MujerCalatrava shaped this bridge after two bodies mid-tango — and the 170-metre span literally rotates.
- 10Torre MonumentalA clock tower built by Buenos Aires's British community as a gift to Argentina — then renamed by Argentina after the two countries went to war.
- 11King Fahd Islamic Cultural CenterLatin America's largest mosque rose from a Palermo field after a 1995 state visit to Saudi Arabia.
- 12Kavanagh BuildingIn 1934 a millionaire sold two ranches at age 39 to erect her own skyscraper — which on inauguration day in 1936 became the tallest reinforced-concrete structure on the planet.
- 13El Ateneo Grand SplendidA 1919 tango theatre where Carlos Gardel once performed is now a bookshop — and the original stage is a café.
- 14Avenida de MayoThe boulevard that predates Madrid's Gran Vía by 16 years, built to make Buenos Aires feel like Paris.
- 15Planetario Galileo GalileiA silver dome in Palermo where you can stand next to a moon rock gifted by Nixon, then watch 8,900 stars wheel across a 20-metre aluminium sky.
Historic Sites12
- 16Casa RosadaThe baby-pink paint was a political recipe: mix the Federalists' red with the Unitarians' white, and maybe stop a civil war.
- 17Teatro ColónAcoustics expert Leo Beranek surveyed leading international opera and orchestra directors and ranked this hall the world's best room for opera — not a slogan, a measured result.
- 18Plaza de MayoEvery defining moment in Argentine political life — from the May Revolution to the country's largest street protests — has played out on this one square.
- 19ESMA Museum and Site of MemoryArgentina's largest Dirty War detention center is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the disappeared are finally named.
- 20Recoleta CemeteryBuenos Aires buried its famous dead in marble palaces above ground — all 4,691 of them, arranged in city blocks you can actually walk.
- 21Buenos Aires Metropolitan CathedralJuan de Garay's 1580 founding document reserved this exact city block for a church — Buenos Aires was born around it.
- 22El CilindroOn a November night in 1967, 120,000 people packed this bowl to watch Racing beat Celtic — the highest attendance ever recorded at an Argentine stadium.
- 23Buenos Aires Stock ExchangeTwo buildings, two eras: a 1916 Christophersen facade and a 1977 Álvarez annex bookend a century of Argentine finance on Leandro Alem Avenue.
- 24Templo LibertadThirty-five years of construction for Argentina's oldest Jewish congregation.
- 25Cabildo de Buenos AiresFor 269 years it was a prison; the same building also became, in 1810, the birthplace of Buenos Aires's first public library.
- 26Café TortoniThe café where Borges and Einstein both pulled up a chair, opened in 1858 by a Frenchman who missed Paris.
- 27Pirámide de MayoBuenos Aires' oldest national monument was rushed to completion in weeks from 500 bricks for a birthday party — then physically moved 63 metres east over a century later.
Museums & Galleries5
- 28Museo Nacional de Bellas ArtesAn 1870 drainage pumping station — repurposed in 1943 — now holds Rembrandts, Van Goghs, and Rodins across 34 halls.
- 29National Museum of Decorative ArtsAn Argentine ambassador's Recoleta palace, handed to the nation lock, stock, and antiques in 1937.
- 30National Historical Museum (Museo Histórico Nacional)The actual belongings of San Martín, Belgrano, and the Peróns — inside a mansion whose American owner was exiled after the 1852 coup that toppled his patron.
- 31MALBA — Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos AiresThe Frida Kahlo that set the record price for the artist at the time of purchase hangs in a Palermo building won from a 450-entry global design competition.
- 32Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences MuseumSouth America's first natural sciences museum — and Alexander von Humboldt sent research requests here.
Parks & Gardens2
- 33Buenos Aires Botanical GardenThree gardens — Roman, French, and Oriental — each planted to a different century and continent, inside one triangular Palermo block.
- 34Parque Tres de Febrero (Bosques de Palermo)A dictator's seized estate turned 400-hectare public park, where rose gardens and a Modernist planetarium sit alongside Borges in bronze.
