We love going to botanical gardens. Whenever we travel to a city that has a botanical garden, we always make time to visit it. The Botanical Garden in Buenos Aires is very convenient, right across the street from our apartment! We spent time wandering around, looking at the plants, and enjoying the shade.

The garden was designed in 1898 by Carlos Thays, the landscape architect who was responsible for many of the parks and green spaces around the city. The garden is huge and has thousands of botanical species on view.

The garden is also designated as a “rifugio climatico,” a climate refuge and a shady place where people can go hang out in the summer.

Entrance is free, and people take advantage of this amenity. There were lots of visitors this afternoon – people chatting with a friend, reading a book, listening to music, strolling around, or just sitting. The garden is a quiet, peaceful get-away in the middle of the city. Enjoy the photos!

We had a lazy day mostly due to the weather. The heat and humidity are really quite exhausting, so we spent the morning relaxing in the apartment. For lunch, we were in the mood for a light meal. Traditional Argentine food is heavy on meat and potatoes, but there are a lot of vegetarian options these days. We found an excellent vegetarian restaurant called Puerta a few blocks away. The place was small but the food was creative and delicious.

Then we went down the street and got gelato.

Then we saw this, and Chad said, “Huh, that’s not how we do things in the United States.”

In the afternoon, we wandered around the botanical garden. We were hoping the shade in the garden would provide a refuge from the heat, but we were still hot and sweaty. Exploring the garden did provide an interesting distraction, and we spent a couple of hours there.

We returned to the apartment at 5 pm just as it started to rain and continued to rain for the next two hours. We alternated between reading, relaxing, and watching the rain across the city. 

When the rained stopped, the temperature was much cooler, so we went back outside for a walk around the neighborhood. We don’t know if any grocery stores or restaurants will be open on Christmas day, so we picked up some food for our fridge.

We had dinner at a restaurant across the street called Ganzo. It’s up on the second floor, so it was an interesting vantage point to watch people and cars pass by below. We started with a cocktail and then had dinner at  9 pm, the typical dinner hour in Buenos Aires. The food wasn’t that great, but it was nice to sit there for a couple of hours, enjoying each other’s company.

After that, we called it a night and headed home.

The Japanese Garden opened in 1967, and it was designed and constructed by the Japanese community in Buenos Aires as a tribute to the first visit of the Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko to Argentina. 

There is a small cafe on site that has typical Argentine lunch fare, and the visitor center also has a restaurant with sushi and sashimi. We didn’t eat there, but we spent a morning strolling around and enjoying the garden and the views.

There were interesting sculptures throughout the garden.

There was a small exhibit of bonsai trees.

The visitor center had an exhibit of kimonos, parasols, and musical instruments.

There were also examples of origami in the visitor center.

There is so much to see and do in Palermo, we spent another day exploring our neighborhood.  We started with breakfast at a cafe down the street.

We took a 30-minute walk north to the Japanese Garden. I’ll give the garden its own blog post since there was so much to see there.

On the way to the garden, we crossed Avenida del Libertador. Buenos Aires has several grand avenues, and this is one of them. It is 11 lanes wide, all going in the same direction. It was mind-boggling.  

Believe it or not, this is not the widest avenue in the city. That title goes to Avenida 9 de Julio which was modeled after the Champs-Elysees in Paris and, at 14 lanes wide, is the widest street in the world. That one takes a pedestrian two traffic cycles to cross the street, and that’s only if they don’t dilly-dally.

Walking around today, we also saw lots of dog-walkers. Portenos (people in Buenos Aires) love their dogs, and dog-walkers take the pooches out during the day when their owners are at work. This guy had 8 or 9 dogs. When he got to the crosswalk of Avenida de Libertador, he untangled all of the leashes and took pictures all around to prove that he took the dogs out, and then he crossed the street with both hands in the air so the cars knew to give him a wide berth with all of those dogs.

We stopped at a pharmacy to get some cold medicine for Chad. I only know very basic Spanish, so I used google translate on my phone and typed, “My husband has a cold. Do you have decongestant?” and showed it to the pharmacist. The pharmacist handed some medicine to me and used his own phone to translate and showed me, “Take this every 4 to 5 hours.” Thanks, Technology!

Afterwards, lunch was at a little bistro called Kajue. 

After lunch, we strolled around some more and found the hipster part of the neighborhood with lots of stylish shops. Chad pointed out that this area was for “hipsters with money.” Things seemed expensive in these shops.

At this point, we were hot, tired, and sweaty, so we got some gelato and then headed home to rest. We knew it would be summer here, but we didn’t really think about how exhausting the weather would be. When it’s 85 degrees and 85% humidity in Atlanta, it doesn’t seem bad, but we’re not usually walking around for hours in that weather. We’re at the point here where we want to take multiple showers a day.

So after resting, we thought, let’s go walk around in the heat some more. We explored another part of the neighborhood and stopped for a cocktail at Tres Monos. This place has been voted the best bar in Latin America and one of the 50 best bars in the world, and the cocktails were very interesting.

On the way back to our apartment, we popped into a little neighborhood shop to buy a bottle of wine. We left the shop with wine, a very interesting cheese, olives, salami, and a local beer. Chad is so good at asking for local recommendations and a taste of this and a taste of that, and then we have a full grocery bag of local treats. And then we stopped into a panaderia to get some bread, and this panaderia also had a lot of delicious pastries and cakes.

Dinner was a combination of restaurant leftovers and miscellaneous groceries as we watched the evening turn into night over the botanical gardens.

Buenos Aires has been on our list of places to visit for years. Our primary purpose of this trip was the Antarctica cruise, but we figured, as long as we’re traveling all the way to the southern end of the globe, we might as well take advantage and spend a week in Buenos Aires. I can already tell that one week is not enough time, a month would be better, but we’ll certainly enjoy it while we’re here.

Our apartment is in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The metro area of Buenos Aires has 17 million people, and Palermo is the most populated neighborhood. It is just northwest of the historic city center. It is a very hip neighborhood with lots of shops, boutiques, restaurants, and nightlife. 

Palermo is a stately old neighborhood with some beautiful buildings from the 19th century. Our building, however, is only a couple of years old.

Palermo has several huge gardens and parks, and our apartment is right across the street from the Botanical Garden. Just beyond the Botanical Garden is a series of other gardens that stretch to the river’s edge.

We spent the day exploring the neighborhood with no particular destination in mind. We found lots of cafes, restaurants, gelato shops, little grocery stores, and other shops with everything from shoes to clothes to toys to gifts and more.  This is a very vibrant neighborhood.

While this is a very stately old-world kind of neighborhood, most of the buildings are 20th century. Every once in a while you can spot one from the late 1800s when the city built rich, opulent houses and other structures.

We had a superb lunch at a small restaurant with lots of character. We each ordered a beef dish and shared a salad. Argentina is known for its beef, and this meal did not disappoint. Yum!

In the evening, we explored another area of the neighborhood and stopped for a cocktail and some people watching. There is no shortage of people walking their dogs, and there is a surprising number of dachshunds. So many wiener dogs, everywhere.

At some point, Chad realized that it was the solstice and, since we’re in the southern hemisphere, we got to experience our second summer solstice of 2025. We had two longest days of the year! 

After the cold and dry climate of Antarctica, we’re enjoying the heat and humidity of summer in Argentina. The weather is great, perfect for walking around and exploring or just for sitting and watching people go by.