The Parque Tres de Febrero is one of the Buenos Aires’ largest parks, and it’s right here in our neighborhood of Palermo. The design was inspired by London’s Hyde Park and Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. There are many different areas of the park with lots of things to do and see.

The most popular area is around the Lago de Rosedal. There is a wide pedestrian and cycling road that runs along here as well as sidewalks and walking paths. The place was full of people this Christmas morning getting some exercise, strolling, sitting with friends, and sunbathing.

The lake has a lot of resident geese as well as paddle boats that you can rent for a tour around the water. Of course, paddle boats and other activities were closed due to the holiday, but there were still a lot of people out and about.

In the middle of the lake, there is a large rose garden with thousands of plants.

At the far end of the lake, we found some restaurants nestled under the arches of the train tracks that lead to the central train station. We also found a carousel.

In another area of the park, there is a planetarium. At night, the dome of the planetarium has been lighted up with red and green lights which we can see from our apartment.

Other areas of the park have groves of trees, ponds and lakes, and large grassy areas.

It was a great place to spend Christmas morning.

Today the temperature was 10 degrees cooler, only 80 F, and the humidity was 50%, so the weather was perfect and a nice change from our other days. We spent the morning walking through the neighborhood to see what was going on. Nothing. The streets were quiet with only a couple of cars and a few people outside. But we did see some sights along the way.

We headed to the Parque Tres de Febrero, one of the biggest parks in the city and, lucky for us, not far from our apartment. We spent a couple of hours walking around, exploring the park, and we discovered that this is where people headed when they were going stir-crazy on Christmas day.

As we headed home, we passed two kioscos (little shops that sell candy, chips, and drinks) that were open and one cafe. Everything else was shuttered.

We had lunch at home with the balcony doors wide open to let in the breeze, and then relaxed for a couple of hours.

We went back out for another long walk mid-afternoon since the weather was so nice. At this point, we saw a lot more people out, and cafes and gelaterias were open for business. People in Buenos Aires like their afternoon coffee and pastries and like their ice cream.

This time it was a little warmer outside, so we came back home to some air conditioning for an hour.

Then we headed out again at 5:30 for another walk to see what was open. Things were still pretty quiet around the neighborhood.

Then we found an intersection in the hipster area Palermo Soho with bars and snacks and sidewalk seating and lots of people. It makes sense that things would be open here since this part of the neighborhood is young and vibrant. We had a cocktail and then headed home for dinner.

Christmas here has not been quite what we expected. When we went to Madrid in November/December 2019, the city was decked out for Christmas.

When we made plans to spend Christmas week 2025 in Buenos Aires, I expected a grand celebration of the holiday and thought the city would be decorated. Instead, almost all of the decorations have been in shops. We’ve just seen a few things in public parks. And while things were quiet this morning, at the end of the day, the streets were bustling again, almost like it was a normal Thursday (but the shops were still closed).

But we have also seen these fun things. Merry Christmas!

And my personal favorite, a sign in a pet store. “Perro” means “dog”, so Perry Christmas!

Il Cementerio de la Recoleta opened in 1822, and it was the city’s first public cemetery. With 4,691 mausoleums, it is the final resting place for Argentina’s most influential families including 20 former presidents, military commanders, Nobel prize winners, and famous authors.

You could easily spend half a day wandering around. It’s huge. The cemetery is laid out with a series of streets, alleys, and little plazas.

There is a big variety of design styles for the mausoleum buildings.

This mausoleum contains the grave of a Nobel prize winner in chemistry who died in 1971. He was very modest, but he came from a wealthy family. When this building was constructed in 1914, it cost 3 million dollars. It is estimated to be worth 15 million dollars today due to the precious stone and gold used in the design.

This family mausoleum had photos on the facade. We’ve visited cemeteries in Italy, and this is common there.

A lot of mausoleums had windows and you could see the caskets inside.

Not all graves are marked with mausoleums. Here are some others that we saw.

There were a lot of interesting details throughout the cemetery.

And the most famous gravesite of all is that of Eva Peron.

Maria Eva Duarte was born into poverty in rural Argentina in 1919. She married Juan Peron in 1945, and he became president of Argentina in 1946. During her short life, she was an actress, a politician, an activist, and a philanthropist. She was an advocate for women’s suffrage, workers’ rights across the country, and children’s education and well-being.

She died in 1952. She was a beloved figured, and on the day of her funeral procession, Argentina ran out of flowers. Evita lies in a heavily fortified crypt 5 meters underground to protect her remains.

We got up this morning and hailed a taxi to the Recoleta neighborhood. The first stop was to visit the famous cemetery.

Afterwards, we walked through the neighborhood. Recoleta has grand avenues, stately mansions, and luxury hotels. It is a grand old neighborhood.

We passed into the Barrio Norte neighborhood which is filled with more grand avenues and beautiful old buildings. This seems to be the main shopping district of the city with shops everywhere. 

Our next stop was El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore in Barrio Norte. This building was originally built in 1919 as a theater for ballet, opera, and tango. In 2000, it was converted into a bookstore, and it retains the character of the original theater. It is so cool!

Lunch was at a place that specializes in milanesa, one of the traditional Argentine dishes. A milanesa is a breaded and sautéed cutlet of beef or chicken which is pounded very thin, and it can be served with a variety of toppings. On our first day here, I had beef milanesa napolitana with melted provolone and sliced tomatoes on top. Today I had a plain chicken milanesa, and it hit the spot.

We had grand plans to go to another neighborhood after lunch, but by this point, we were so hot and tired that we took a taxi back to the apartment and just chilled for a couple of hours.

We eventually worked up some energy to go out into the neighborhood, primarily to buy some groceries. We had a few things in the fridge from the previous couple of days, but we needed more supplies for this evening (Christmas Eve) and all day tomorrow (Christmas Day).

I’m glad we went out when we did! Most mom-and-pop shops had closed early. The giant supermarket was still open, but it closed in 10 minutes at 6 pm. We hustled around to make sure we bought enough food, and we came home with some stuff for salad, bread, bottled water, pasta, and tomato sauce, and yogurt, fruit, and juice for tomorrow morning. With these new groceries and what we already have in the fridge, we’re all set for our holiday meals.

Now Chad is prepping some food for dinner. We’ve been seeing green parakeets flying around in the botanical garden across the street, and I’ve been watching the clouds over the city. Our apartment really does have a wonderful view.

Felices Festivas and Feliz Navidad.

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.

After spending one last night on the boat in the port of Ushuaia, we woke up and vacated our stateroom at 7:30 am. We took a 20-minute shuttle bus ride to the airport to catch our charter flight. 

Imagine a small local airport that has only 6 gates, and then a series of shuttle buses drops off 200+ people at the front door all at the same time. Needless to say, the line for security was insanely long. The airport is relatively new, and it is a beautiful design, all heavy timber construction.

There were several Viking crew members that were headed home for the holidays, and they were at the gate with us. They were the last ones to board the plane and their seats were in the very back, and as they walked through the plane to their seats, all of us Viking guests gave them a long round of applause. It was well deserved. All of the crew were really amazing on this voyage.

The flight was annoying because we were tired and hungry. The food and drink service was minimal, and there was enough turbulence that we were cranky when we landed. Plus, Chad had developed a terrible head cold the last two days on the ship, so he was feeling really miserable and dealing with lots of congestion and pressure from the altitude.

We landed at 2 pm and went to baggage claim. As the bags came around, Chad grabbed his backpack, but mine never showed up. Apparently, only half of the passenger bags made it onto the plane. Viking didn’t know where the bags were. The airline didn’t know where the bags were. Nobody knew when the bags would arrive.

The second charter plane arrived late that afternoon, and some of the missing luggage (but not all) was on that plane. Luckily, my backpack was on that flight, and after standing around the airport for 4-1/2 hours, I finally had my bag. But you can imagine the epic amounts of crankiness at this point.

We hopped into a taxi to go to our AirBnB, and the 25-minute ride took over an hour. In the end, we made it into our apartment just before 8 pm and had to rest and decompress for a bit.

I knew that we needed to get to a grocery store to get a few things like bottled water. (Visitors aren’t supposed to drink the tap water here because our bodies aren’t used to the local water.) There is a huge supermarket a couple of blocks away, so we got water, a bottle of wine, and some prepared foods for dinner. We didn’t have the energy for a restaurant meal.

What was interesting, is that we were at the store at 9 pm on a Saturday night, and it was packed! People generally eat the evening meal here at 9 pm or later, so maybe everyone was picking up some stuff for dinner.

We came back to our little apartment, had some food, and went to bed. After a long day, we were wiped out and ready to get some rest and wake up and start anew in the morning.