Buenos Aires hides much more than it reveals. Behind its avenues, squares, and buildings with dreamlike domes lies a Secret Buenos Aires that conceals world records, visits by geniuses, unusual monuments, and 18 secrets you may not have known about our city. Thanks to José Díaz Diez for revealing them.
A building in Microcentro was designed by Gustave Eiffel
The same engineer who immortalized Paris with the Eiffel Tower designed “El Forjador,” the building located at 535 Perú Street, featuring a sculpture of a blacksmith with a hammer raised high. Did you know that you’re standing in front of a work by the man who redefined 19th-century iron architecture?
📍Where: 535 Perú Street, Monserrat.
Buenos Aires once had the largest swimming pool in the world
Between 1950 and 1960, Buenos Aires held a record that seems impossible to imagine today: that of having the world’s largest public swimming pool, on the waterfront, which was closed to extend the runway at Aeroparque.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry lived and worked in Buenos Aires
The author of The Little Prince didn’t just visit Buenos Aires. Between 1929 and 1931, he worked in the building at Florida and Diagonal Norte, headquarters of the airline Aeroposta Argentina, and lived just a few steps away, on Galería Güemes.
📍Where: Florida and Diagonal Norte / Galería Güemes, 165 Florida.
Buenos Aires had the most extensive tram network in the world
For decades, Buenos Aires was known as the “City of Trams” because its network grew to 850 kilometers of tracks, the most extensive in the world. The last trams were retired in 1963.
The city with the most bookstores and soccer stadiums in the world
Buenos Aires holds two cultural records: it is the city with the highest number of bookstores per capita in the world and also the one with the highest concentration of soccer stadiums in a single area. Do we porteños love soccer and books? It certainly seems that way.
A 240-year-old bookstore
Founded in 1785 under the name Librería del Colegio, the current Librería de Ávila (at 500 Alsina Street, corner of Bolívar) is the third-oldest bookstore in the world. It has survived wars, revolutions, crises, and the digital age. It remains open.
📍Where: 500 Alsina St. at the corner of Bolívar St., Monserrat
There are three copies of the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus in the city
Italy donated to Argentina a bronze replica of Luperca, the mythical she-wolf who nursed the founders of Rome. The original is on display at the Buenos Aires Legislature; its two copies can be seen in Lezama Park and the Botanical Garden.
📍Where: Lezama Park (San Telmo) and the Botanical Garden (Palermo).
Harrods had its only branch outside London in Buenos Aires
In 1914, the only branch of London’s Harrods outside the United Kingdom opened on the block between Florida, Córdoba, Paraguay, and San Martín streets. It operated for 84 years as one of the most luxurious stores in South America, until it closed its doors in 1998.
📍Where: Florida and Córdoba, Downtown.
The Chrysler Palace had a rooftop racetrack
In Palermo Chico, the Chrysler Palace was the second building in the world to incorporate a race track on its roof: it served as a test circuit for the cars the company sold in Argentina. In 1994, the building was sold, and lofts and private residences were built there.
📍Where: 3351 Figueroa Alcorta Ave.
The largest fragment of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany is in Barracas
Editorial Perfil preserves a 20-meter section of the Berlin Wall in the lobby of its building in Barracas—the longest section outside of Germany—and you can see it from the building’s entrance.
📍Where: 📍2731 California
Einstein gave lectures in Buenos Aires in 1925 at a school in Buenos Aires
Physicist Albert Einstein visited Buenos Aires in 1925 to deliver a series of lectures on his Theory of Relativity, and the venue was the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. A school where Argentine presidents and Nobel laureates studied.
The monument to Sarmiento was created by Rodin
Did you know that there is an original version of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker in Plaza Congreso? What is less well known is that the monument to Domingo F. Sarmiento located at the intersection of Av. del Libertador and Av. Sarmiento is also the work of the same sculptor. Buenos Aires has two Rodins on display outdoors.
📍Where: Av. del Libertador and Av. Sarmiento, Palermo.
The city’s oldest monument is 2,000 years old
In Plaza Italia, in Palermo, there is a marble column from the Roman Empire that is approximately 2,000 years old. It was donated by the city of Rome and is the oldest monument that can be seen in Buenos Aires.
📍Where: Plaza Italia, Palermo.
Buenos Aires has its own Statue of Liberty, older than the one in New York
The Statue of Liberty in Barrancas de Belgrano was designed by Frédéric Bartholdi, the same creator of the Statue of Liberty in New York, and was inaugurated in 1886, a few months before the one in New York. But Buenos Aires has not one but two Statues of Liberty. The second Statue of Liberty crowns the façade of the Sarmiento School, on Callao Street between Corrientes and Lavalle.
📍Where: Barrancas de Belgrano / Callao between Corrientes and Lavalle.
Discovering these secrets of Buenos Aires is free
Most of these Buenos Aires secrets can be explored on foot or by public transportation and are right in plain sight.
You can start in Monserrat to see El Forjador and the Ávila Bookstore, continue through Microcentro to see the facade of the Saint-Exupéry building and the Harrods building, then cross over to Palermo to see Rodin’s sculptures of Sarmiento, the Roman column, and the Luperca she-wolf at the Botanical Garden, and finish in Belgrano with the Statue of Liberty. Did you know any of these secrets?