Before the avenues: colonial Buenos Aires, from the Manzana de las Luces to Parque Lezama

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Long before the boulevards and palaces, Buenos Aires was a small colonial city of a few blocks above the river. Its traces survive in Monserrat and San Telmo: a Jesuit church, tunnels and cisterns beneath a 19th-century house, and the park where the first founders may have landed. A walk through the oldest city, with the places in our guide.

Central Buenos Aires grew rich and grand between the 1880s and the 1930s, and built itself in the image of Paris and Madrid. But walk south from the Plaza de Mayo into Monserrat and San Telmo, and an older city shows through: a Jesuit church, colonial tunnels, a market street on a plan drawn four centuries ago and a park above the river where, some historians believe, the story began.

Two foundings

Buenos Aires was founded twice. The first settlement, in 1536, was abandoned within a year, struck by famine and disease; some historians place it on the bluff that is now Parque Lezama. The second founding came in 1580, and its heart was the square that is now the Plaza de Mayo, still the oldest square in Buenos Aires, where the white colonial Cabildo, the old town hall, stands.

The streets of that grid survive. The Calle Florida, today a pedestrian shopping street, already appears on a city plan of 1582, the City’s tourism office notes, only two years after the second founding.

The Manzana de las Luces

A few blocks south of the square, at Perú 272, stands the Manzana de las Luces, the Block of Enlightenment. Its Iglesia de San Ignacio, built by the Jesuits, is considered the oldest church still standing in the city, and colonial tunnels, used for defence and for smuggling, run beneath it.

The name first appeared in the newspaper El Argos in 1821, for the institutions that worked on the block: the Colegio de San Ignacio, the old university, the city’s first theatre and first museum, the royal printing press and the national library. Guided visits take in the church and the Sala de Representantes; the tunnels and the Procuraduría are closed for restoration.

Beneath San Telmo

Walk south down the Calle Defensa into San Telmo. At number 755 is El Zanjón de Granados, on what was the seventh and last block to the south of the city of 1580, where a stream once carried the water from the higher ground down to the river.

Four centuries of the city lie beneath the cobbles of Monserrat and San Telmo.

In the 1980s, restoring the Italianate house that stands there, its owner uncovered tunnels that once channelled the stream, cisterns, wells and the remains of buildings from 1700, 1740 and 1830. The City calls it its most important archaeological recovery; visits are by guided tour, booked on its website.

On Sundays the Feria de San Telmo fills Defensa from the Plaza Dorrego with antiques, crafts and tango dancers, and the iron-and-glass Mercado de San Telmo is a block away.

Parque Lezama

Defensa ends at Parque Lezama, on the bluff where the first founding may have stood. In 1857 the land was bought by Gregorio Lezama, who planted exotic trees and hired European landscape gardeners to make one of the most luxurious private gardens of its day; in 1894 his widow sold it to the city, on condition that it became a public park bearing his name.

Today it has statues, among them a monument to the first founder, an amphitheatre, a viewpoint and a fountain. Lezama’s old house on Defensa is the Museo Histórico Nacional, and across the street rise the blue domes of the Russian Orthodox church, designed by the architect Alejandro Christophersen.

Our advice: come on a Sunday morning, start at the Manzana de las Luces, book El Zanjón ahead for midday, browse the Feria de San Telmo on the way south and finish with a late lunch near Parque Lezama.