Avenida Corrientes — The Street That Never Sleeps

The diagonal artery that runs northwest from Avenida 9 de Julio to the Palermo neighbourhood is Buenos Aires' cultural spine. Corrientes is lined with theatres, bookshops, cafés, pizzerias, and milongas — many of them operating past midnight on weekdays and past dawn on weekends. The city's independent theatre scene is centred here, and the density of second-hand bookshops (many open until 3am) is remarkable.

The Avenida Corrientes is where Buenos Aires is most itself: loud, littered with flysheets for plays and concerts, full of people eating at improbable hours. The pizza here — thick, heavy, served by the quarter-slice — is the Buenos Aires style that you either love immediately or struggle to understand. The Theatre San Martín at Corrientes 1530 is one of the better state theatres in the city.

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A story

Corrientes was widened to its current form in 1936, which required demolishing the original Confitería Molino (later rebuilt on a different corner) and dozens of other early buildings. The bookshops arrived in the mid-20th century; by the 1960s, Corrientes had become what Parisian boulevards were to the early modernists — a place where you went specifically to argue about literature and politics over coffee and medialunas until 3am.

☰Avenida Corrientes — The Street That Never Sleeps

Avenida Corrientes — The Street That Never Sleeps