Rosario built its wealth on grain and spent it on culture: an opera house with world-class acoustics, a fine-arts museum holding Goya and El Greco, and ten port silos repainted as a vertical contemporary art museum on the Paraná.
Argentina's strongest European collection outside Buenos Aires: Goya etchings, an El Greco, Sisley and Daubigny alongside Argentine masters Fader, Berni and Schiavoni, in a 1937 rationalist pavilion. Open Thu–Tue 14:00–20:00.
The 1927 Palacio Fuentes at Santa Fe y Sarmiento is Rosario's Catalan-modernist landmark, its tiled dome and stone figures by Miguel Utrillo. Walk east along the Córdoba pedestrian street past the Bolsa de Comercio.
Ten disused 1930s grain silos on the riverbank, painted in bands of colour and stacked into a vertical contemporary museum. Each floor is a single small gallery of Argentine contemporary work; the top level opens onto the Paraná.
Catalan architect Oriol Bohigas buried galleries, a theatre and a cinema inside the brick ramparts of the old Spanish port, finished 1992. Free rotating exhibitions, and terraced steps that drop to the water.
Santa Fe's provincial history museum in Parque Independencia: pre-Columbian ceramics, Cusco-school colonial painting, Jesuit silverwork from the missions and a hall of religious imagery, inside a 1939 neocolonial building.
A patrician house on Plaza 25 de Mayo kept exactly as the Estévez family left it: Sèvres and Meissen porcelain, Roman glass, Flemish tapestry and Spanish colonial furniture arranged room by room rather than by catalogue.
Set in the mansion the Army's II Corps used as its command post during the 1976–83 dictatorship, the museum documents Santa Fe's disappeared through testimony, seized archives and commissioned contemporary art.
Rosario's 1904 opera house — an Italianate horseshoe of 1,500 seats, gilt boxes and a ceiling fresco, with acoustics regularly ranked among the finest in South America. Season runs March to December.
A restored 1900 railway freight shed on Cafferata reopened as Rosario's artisan market: Santa Fe salame, regional cheeses, craft producers and folk sets under the original iron roof. Wed–Sun, mornings are calmest.
The old grain-brokers' and brothel district north of the centre, now Rosario's antiques and design belt: Belle Époque façades along Ricardone and Pichincha, vinyl dealers, restoration workshops and tango bars.
Named for the cartoonist who created Inodoro Pereyra and wrote Rosario's funniest football stories, the centre holds galleries, a comics collection and a photographic archive of the city, with free courtyard concerts.
Home of the city's municipal tango orchestra in a converted riverside warehouse on Avenida Illia: milongas, beginner classes before the floor opens, and a small archive on rosarino singers and bandoneonistas.