Find out where to stay and what to do in Buenos Aires: Insider Advice.
Rebirth and renewal are always alluring. Consider the flowerings that took place in Paris after the war, in Berlin after the wall and in South Africa after apartheid. Following its economic free fall almost five years ago, Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina and of Latin sizzle, has rebounded — and keeps rebounding — with gusto.
Yes, the country's January 2002 meltdown turned the city and its environs on their heads. Many of Buenos Aires's twelve million residents (known as porteños) saw their savings shrink 70 percent after Argentina's currency collapsed and the peso was reestablished at roughly a third of its previous value. According to one resident connected to the Old Guard, even today "everyone who has money sends it abroad. No one trusts local institutions and the whims of government."
But life has stabilized, and the future looks astonishingly bright. Low prices for land and labor postcrisis have enabled outsiders with five-star credentials to restore faded hotels to their former glory. Those most deft (and there were many) at playing the boom-and-bust cycles made a mint on distressed-asset purchases of vineyards, ranches and businesses. Meanwhile, talented designers, musicians and artists came home from Barcelona and Rome.
"I could live anywhere. But I am so happy here," says Celedonio Lohidoy, a leading Argentine jeweler whose creations were featured on Sex and the City. "Here our art vibrates and has an impact. It's like throwing a rock into the water."
"The ability of Argentines to reinvent themselves is amazing," says Marina Palmer, a thirty-something transplant. "The unpredictability makes life exciting and injects creativity into theater, nightlife and fashion." Palmer chucked her New York advertising job to pursue her passion: tango in Buenos Aires, the subject of her book Kiss & Tango. "Buenos Aires is a very seductive place," she says.
On a recent trip there, I felt that pent-up energy reverberating across this sprawling metropolis, which I have loved for its Paris-style boulevards, Belle époque buildings, soulful music and gracious, gorgeous people since I first became enchanted by it, in the early nineties. A decade later I lived in B.A. for a couple of years, and this past spring I was back again, at the city's epicenter, the expansive 9 de Julio Boulevard and its soaring obelisco. To the northwest was the posh, Fifth Avenue-like Recoleta neighborhood, where Dior-wearing residents walk their pooches past auction houses, and farther west, the fringes of the artistic Palermo district. To the southeast were the tango-dancing barrios of San Telmo and La Boca, and to the east, the port area on the Plata river. But it didn't matter in which direction I went. All over Buenos Aires, things were happening.
Consider this: since 2001, when the economic crisis began in earnest, the chic Four Seasons, Sofitel and Faena hotels have debuted. So have the MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) and the edgier Konex Cultural Center, a multidisciplinary arts space in bohemian Abasto. A museum devoted to Eva Perón opened in Palermo in 2002, the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of her death. Housed in a lovely colonial mansion, the Evita Museum has a direct tie to its subject, one quite appropriate for her: the building once served as a women's shelter that was run by Evita's foundation.
Collectively, such changes inspired UNESCO to name Buenos Aires its first City of Design, in 2005, but that's just part of B.A.'s comeback. Today garments from avant-garde designer Jessica Trosman sell at Barneys New York and in Tokyo; interest in new wine schools has increased tremendously as regional blends win recognition abroad (exports shot up 37 percent in the past year); and area film festivals are breaking attendance records (Susan Sarandon was among the celebrities at the Mar del Plata festival, in March). In July the 165-room Park Hyatt opened in the former Grand Duhau Palace, a seventy-year-old residence in Recoleta that was inspired by France's Château du Marais. Massive renovations of historic properties in central neighborhoods (the Park Hyatt cost $75 million), as well as the revving up of outlying areas — such as Palermo Viejo, where new bars, like El Diamante, start packing them in at midnight — mean that Buenos Aires is on top again.
"Crises are painful, but you emerge stronger," says Alan Faena, a fashion designer who partnered with designer Philippe Starck and a group of American investors (including Austin Hearst, whose family's Hearst Corporation publishes T&C Travel) to open the Faena Hotel & Universe. Located in Puerto Madero, a long-neglected waterfront-and-warehouse neighborhood akin to London's Docklands, the hotel has become a symbol of the city's renaissance. "We never lost our spirit," says Faena. "We know the art of life."
