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Buenos Aires Spotlights Its Cafes
By CAMILLE CUSUMANO / The New York Times
On Saturday nights in Buenos Aires, the Miramar cafe crackles with the energy of local families, famished tango dancers and gregarious waiters delivering plates of crisp-skinned sardines, shrimp and fresh oysters. Miramar is in San Cristóbal, a barrio known for its tango dance halls but otherwise off the tourist beat. Local diners come to share generous servings of oxtail soup, rabbit hunter-style or chorizo-laced Spanish frittata. Even with a couple of bottles of malbec and mineral water, the feast seldom tops the equivalent of $15 a person.
Still owned by the Ramos family, its founders, the Miramar began life in 1948 as an almacén, or bulk-goods grocer, and its endurance qualifies it for the city's recognized list of cafes — or bares notables. In 1998, Buenos Aires legislated this official designation for bars, cafes, billiard halls and confectionaries whose antiquity, architecture or historical significance make them worthy of note and of preservation efforts.
The annually expanding list (now more than 50) includes some magnificent and famous cafes, like Las Violetas and Tortoni with their beveled mirrors and polished-wood bars — cathedrals where tourists gather to worship legends like Carlos Gardel, a tango crooner who died in a 1935 plane crash and "every day sings a little better," it is said. But other bares notables are humbler, and it is there, amid the worn interiors like that of the Miramar, that you can find the traditional menus designed to please Argentines, whose melting-pot cuisine has a marked Italian influence. The food is home-cooked good, abundant and, with the favorable dollar-to-peso exchange rate, inexpensive. >>> Go to Full Story >>>
Life on the ranch in Argentina
By Stanley Stewart / The Sunday Times
Stanley Stewart discovers Argentina’s rugged north, where the gauchos’ influence ends and true wilderness begins
Capybaras are proof that looks are not everything. They look like the love child of a hippopotamus and a hamster, and combine a hippo's watery wallowing with the hamster's nose-twitching scurrying about. Short-legged, bristle-haired, snub-nosed, beady-eyed, they are unmistakably rodents, though rodents the size of a mongrel spaniel. Yet theirs is an enviable existence, a life devoted to sensual pleasure. Capybaras are said to make love up to 30 times a day. When they are not giving one another love bites, they devote their time to eating, sunbathing, swimming and sleeping, in that order. Capybara existence is entirely benign, a life without shadows, and they seem unable to grasp the idea that bad stuff happens. One of the bad things is that their whole environment is under threat. The animals inhabit the Esteros del Ibera, a vast wetland in northern Argentina, similar to the Pantanal across the border in Brazil. It is one of South America’s great unsung attractions — its lagoons and marshes have been described by many naturalists as the continent's Serengeti. Teeming with wildlife — aquatic, avian and terrestrial — the Esteros del Ibera rates fleeting mention in most guidebooks, and until now has seen relatively few tourists.
Official Argentine Tourism Site: www.turismo.gov.ar
