From June 25 to 27, the Hotel Caesar Park Buenos Aires’ Agraz restarurant will offer a Chilean food festival organized by Pro Chile as of 8:30pm. The five-course à la carte dinner, paired to different Chilean wines, will be designed by Rodrigo Barañao Garcés, a chef with a signature restaurant in the exclusive Providencia neighborhood of Santiago, and a TV program in which traditional Chilean food with a contemporary touch is the protagonist. The food will be prepared by the Chilean chef invited for this occasion, and by Micaela Conesa, the executive chef of the Caesar Park Buenos Aires. It will cost 190 pesos, including the wines. Reservations at 4819-1129.
The meeting point is Av. S. de Liniers and Calle Padre Castañeda. In addition, from 12.30pm and every hour after that, there are one-hour guided excursions on the Líneas Delta passenger boats (Stand Nª 6 of the boat terminal), during which the guide tells the stories behind the rowing clubs, the Argentine Naval Museum, the weekend summer homes built in the early 20th century, the Tigre Hotel and former Tigre Club, School Nº 8, the Chapel of Our Lady of Luján, the museum that occupies Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s summer home in the Delta, the Fruit Market, the Trilenium casino and the Parque de la Costa amusement park. Participants pay the price of their tickets. Members of the Center also lead two-and-a-half-hour walking tours in the Tres Bocas area in the Delta that put visitors in contact with nature and island residents. The meeting point for these excursions, which begin in a passenger boat, is the Todo Delta stand (Nº 2 in the boat terminal) at 2.45pm. It costs 25 pesos including the round-trip boat ticket. For more information, visit 
Most of them are university graduates in fields such as law and business administration, but the call of the mountains is so strong that they have found ways to play both roles by spelling each other on rides. Foreign tourists don’t realize to what extent the family names of some of them are related to Argentina’s early history, and they do not volunteer information. They, and the mountain families whose homes they have equipped with proper bathrooms and sleeping quarters for visitors, act as the hosts of the riders who book pack trips from April to December.
First we rode up the broad bed of the Río Grande, which at that time of the year was almost dry. It was strewn with enormous boulders left by different summer flash floods (for which reason Nicolás does not offer rides in the summer). Then we passed through a small cloud forest area and continued up through a sparser alder forest and a brushy area before finally arriving at a grassy mountain top. There we made sandwiches with fresh bread and cold cuts on a tablecloth spread out on the grass.
But more impressive still was the way that local people live and interact in remote outposts. There are no roads, just trails, a few rudimentary landing strips and clearings where a helicopter can land. They ride down to town to buy provisions once a month, river levels permitting. 
It was one of the few menhirs that had escaped the collection and concentration atop a hill near Tafí del Valle ordered by the military governor during the 1970s. Later on, we rode across a ridge that harbors the remains of stone constructions that were possibly lookout points built by the same pre-Inca culture.
Las Queñuas is a private nature reserve located on what was once an enormous ranch. When Martínez Zavalía, a rancher and former provincial tourism official, bought the land, he gave outpost families deeds to their homes. It took him three years to get the inn built and bring in the furniture, and even mirrors, on pack mules.
Yet the property’s cozy, tasteful décor has nothing to envy of country hotels nearer town. The guest rooms with their private bathrooms are large and fully equipped, as are the dining room and living room. There are easy chairs on the porch. The midday meal of the second day – pasta with two sauce options – showed that the cook had gone to a cooking school in Buenos Aires. 
As it was a warm day, lunch was served on the patio in front of the inn. It faces an uneven ridge that serves as a landing strip for daring bush pilots. They land headed uphill and take off downhill.
When we were about to descend a particularly steep mountain slope to our lunch stop on the third day, there was a bit of action. Marco got off his horse – a tall, handsome but bloody-minded young Anglo-Arab sorrel palomino – to tighten the cinches of the tourists’ horses. While he was doing that, his mount got loose from the bush where he had left it tied and, calculating the distance, began to inch its way toward freedom. Warned of the impending escape, Marco attempted to dissuade the animal with slow movements and kind words, which were ignored. And it took off at a trot, and then at a gallop down the trail, with him in hot pursuit. He finally caught it in the river 500 meters below because it got tangled up in the reins. During the pursuit a boot sole came loose, and when he washed his feet in the river before lunch, the wounds left by the nails became evident. “It’s nothing serious,” he said as he slipped on some alpargata cloth slippers.
During our last lunch in the mountains, eaten seated beneath the grape arbor of an outpost beside the river, we gorged on delicious fried empanada turnovers and different salads. This place is quiet because the river and difficult trails put it out of reach of motor bikes.
Porteños (Buenos Aires residents) go to these two neighborhoods for much the same reasons as the foreign tourists. In San Telmo they expect to be entertained by colorful street vendors, living statues and assorted other characters on weekends, and in Palermo Viejo they hope to catch sight of some famous model or TV star while dining at a fashionable restaurant or shopping for clothing.
The Sunday flea market in Plaza Dorrego, another gift of Peña, established an antiquarian’s hub and a bohemian attitude that put San Telmo on the map for most tourists around the globe. And for the first time, porteños came to consider that oldness has some worth, at least with regard to architecture. In 2000 the municipality established a Historic City Center Board. In a move that was unrelated to the board, but was in a similar vein, the Public Works Department removed asphalt from some stretches of Calle Defensa and re-installed cobbles. And when the present city government recently began to remove them from certain streets in San Telmo, Palermo and Belgrano, it met the opposition of many residents.
Known simply as Palermo when it was the unpretentious turf of Italian, Spanish and Armenian immigrants who arrived at the turn of the 20th century, the tree-shaded streets of this once-peaceful backwater changed forever in the 1990s, when the 1:1 exchange rate allowed porteños to travel abroad and discover the pleasures of modernity in food, clothing and culture in general. Property prices were still low, but not for long. Realtors and developers christened the part of the neighborhood with the most ethnic restaurants, designer shops and artists’ studios “Palermo Soho” and the one with several TV and cinema studios and radio stations “Palermo Hollywood.” The only retro tendencies that prospered were of literary origin. As the Argentine mass media rediscovered 20th-century writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, Plaza Serrano and the stretch of Calle Serrano between that square and Av. Santa Fe were renamed Plaza Cortázar and Calle Jorge Luis Borges, respectively. The latest additions are a host of new bookstores and art galleries destined to make Palermo the city’s new cultural epicenter. In the summer, a stroll around the plaza and along its most emblematic streets gives the feeling of being in a pleasant upscale US suburb where people sit at aseptic sidewalk cafes and watch the world walk by.
People who let homes or shops in San Telmo and Palermo have a problem in common: the enormous increases in rents and food prices brought by the influx of wealthy new residents and tenants (especially foreign tourists with US dollars or euros). The arrival of these newcomers, who were attracted by the fame and upgrading of these neighborhoods, has forced many longtime residents and merchants to move elsewhere, taking with them the trades that gave their neighborhoods character. A case in point is the Mercado de San Telmo (1879), a privately owned indoor market that once had more than 100 stalls that sold high-quality fresh produce at reasonable prices, but now is full of flea market-type shops and very few food stalls.
Officially inaugurated on July 9, 1894 to give Buenos Aires a grand avenue that would have nothing to envy of those in France, Avenida de Mayo was destined to be important from the moment that Congress approved its construction in 1884. It looks French but its spirit is that of the large Spanish community that adopted it in the early 20th century.
But don’t forget Los 36 Billares (Av. de Mayo 1265), which was inaugurated along with the avenue in 1894 and has one of the city’s last billiard halls (which is in the basement). Upstairs it is a traditional porteño bar with a modest décor and a clientele of largely elderly people who go there to read the newspaper in the mornings over coffee with milk and croissants, and younger clients who choose the executive menu at lunch. It is not full of tourists, and you feel like you are watching a scene from the first half of the 20th century. Los 36 Billares offers tango dinner shows Tuesday to Sunday, and a flamenco show after midnight on Saturday. See 
The Barolo building (Av. de Mayo 1370), an eclectic 22-floor tower built between 1919 and 1923 for an eccentric textile magnate, represents Dante’s Divine Comedy, with Hell on the ground floor, Purgatory in possession of the first to 14th floors, and Heaven extending from the 15th floor up to the beacon on the top floor, which symbolizes salvation. The building’s administration offers tours that leave from the concierge’s desk from 2pm to 7pm on Monday and Thursday. They last 40 minutes, cost 20 pesos, and can be bilingual if some members of the group speak English only. Evening tours can be arranged. Reservations at 4383-1065. 
