Buenos Aires built itself a European capital on beef money, then filled it with its own art. Three days of Italianate palaces turned museums, a opera house with 3.5-second reverberation, and bookshops in converted theatres — plus the Xul Solar and Fader work you won't see anywhere else.
Argentina's national collection in a converted pumping station on Avenida del Libertador: 24 Rodin bronzes, El Greco, Goya, plus rooms of Prilidiano Pueyrredón and Cándido López's one-handed Paraguayan War panoramas. Tue–Fri 11:00–19:30, weekends 10:00–19:30, closed Mondays.
The largest private residence ever built in Argentina — 12,000 m² for one family, modelled on the Louvre by French architect Louis Sortais and finished 1914. Guided tours only, in Spanish and English, through the Great Hall of Honour and its marble rotunda.
Costantini's collection of Latin American modernism in a glass-and-limestone box in Palermo: Frida Kahlo's Autorretrato con chango y loro, Berni's Manifestación, Xul Solar, Torres-García, Matta. Thu–Mon 12:00–20:00, Wednesdays 12:00–21:00, closed Tuesdays.
The house-studio of Alejandro Xul Solar — Borges's closest friend, inventor of two languages and a 12-tone piano — remodelled into interlocking split levels by Pablo Beitía. Around 80 small watercolours of floating cities, astrological beasts and invented alphabets.
Ranked among the world's finest acoustics: a seven-tier horseshoe seating 2,487, with a golden hall of Venetian mosaic and a cupola repainted by Raúl Soldi in 1966. Tours leave every 15 minutes from 09:00 to 17:00, roughly 50 minutes, English and Spanish.
A 1919 theatre by Peró and Torres Armengol turned bookshop in 2000: the boxes are reading nooks, Nazareno Orlandi's ceiling fresco survives intact, and the café occupies the stage behind the original crimson curtain. Open until 22:00 most nights.
René Sergent's 1917 Beaux-Arts palace for the Errázuriz-Alvear family, its interiors intact: a Tudor-panelled hall, a Regency ballroom, El Greco and Manet, and Fernand Léger's 1913 mural in the Art Deco bathroom upstairs. Closed Tuesdays.
A 1916 Italianate power station in La Boca rebuilt as a concert hall, home to the Buenos Aires Philharmonic's chamber programme, with a symphony hall seating 1,200 and a 300-seat chamber room. Most weekday evening concerts are free with tickets released online days ahead.
4,691 vaults on 5.5 hectares — Facundo Quiroga, the Duarte family vault holding Eva Perón, Luis Perlotti and Lola Mora sculptures, and a full grammar of Art Nouveau, Neo-Gothic and Rationalist mausoleums along numbered streets. Open 08:00–18:00 daily.
Open since 1858 on Avenida de Mayo, its Art Nouveau interior of marble, stained glass and mirrors barely altered; the basement room hosted the Peña Signo of Quinquela Martín and Baldomero Fernández Moreno. Expect a queue on the pavement most middays.
The painter's own school-turned-museum above the Riachuelo in La Boca, holding his industrial port canvases plus Argentine figurative painting, and his top-floor studio and bedroom left as he used them. Tue–Fri 10:00–18:00, weekends 11:00–18:00.
The city's oldest bookshop site, trading books since 1785 as the Librería del Colegio opposite the Manzana de las Luces; a basement of Argentine first editions, philosophy and antiquarian stock, with tango and jazz sets in the cellar some evenings.