The Argentine capital is at once a traditional and avant-garde city. A sprawling place of nine million inhabitants, Buenos Aires is most easily defined by its neighbourhoods: Recoleta with its world famous cemetery, Palermo Hollywood with its designer bars and worldwide cuisine or San Telmo where the visitor can buy antiques in a market surrounded by colonial style buildings. Then there's elegant Puerto Madero and La Boca where the first Genoese immigrants settled in red, blue and yellow houses along picturesque Caminito Street .
Buenos Aires is also well known for its great soccer stadiums, tango music and dance (that can be best listened to and viewed in the traditional Café Tortoni). The wide selection of cultural institutions such as the recently opened Latin-American Museum of Art (MALBA) shouldn't be ignored: this is very much Argentina 's cultural capital as well as being the seat of government. There is also a wealth of beauty and history here, and no tourist can leave the city without visiting Palermo Park and the Plaza de Mayo, surrounded by such symbolic buildings as the Cabildo (town hall), the cathedral , and the Casa Rosada , the government's headquarters.
