Argentina: Where the World Ends and Wonder Begins

A Complete Travel Guide to South America's Most Passionate Nation

Introduction

Argentina is a country that defies easy summary. Stretching nearly 3,700 kilometers from the subtropical jungles of the northeast to the frozen tip of Tierra del Fuego, it encompasses more geographic variety than almost any other nation on earth. It is a land of extremes in every sense: the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere towers above its western border, while the world's widest avenue cuts through its cosmopolitan capital. Its people are descended from indigenous nations, Spanish conquistadors, Italian laborers, German immigrants, Jewish refugees, and Welsh settlers who still speak their ancestral language in remote Patagonian valleys. Passionately in love with football, wine, beef, and tango, Argentines are among the most culturally exuberant people on the planet, and their country rewards travelers with experiences that are genuinely unlike anything found elsewhere in the world.

To travel in Argentina is to feel the weight of history pressing against the present at every turn. This is the country that produced Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and also gave the world Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, perhaps the two greatest footballers who ever lived. It is the land where Eva Perón became a saint to millions of impoverished Argentines, where a military dictatorship systematically disappeared thirty thousand of its own citizens, where the tango was born in the smoky tenements and brothels of immigrant neighborhoods, and where a young Che Guevara first encountered the poverty that would radicalize him. Argentina carries all of this history with a peculiar mixture of pride, melancholy, and theatrical emotion that the Argentines themselves call being porteño, a word that ostensibly refers to people from Buenos Aires but which has come to mean a particular way of engaging with the world: dramatically, intellectually, and with passionate conviction.

For the traveler, Argentina offers an almost bewildering richness of options. In Buenos Aires, one of the world's great capital cities, you can attend a world-class opera performance at the Teatro Colón, watch a tango show in a candlelit milonga in San Telmo, browse one of the most beautiful bookshops on earth in a converted theater, and eat a long leisurely steak dinner that stretches well past midnight. In Patagonia, you can stand before the Perito Moreno Glacier as it calves cathedral-sized blocks of ice into a glacial lake, or trek through the volcanic landscape at the base of Mount Fitz Roy, one of the most dramatic peaks on earth. In the wine country around Mendoza, you can cycle through vineyards producing the world's finest Malbec in the shadow of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas. In the far northeast, the Iguazú Falls dwarf Niagara and Victoria Falls alike, dropping in a thunderous curtain across two and a half kilometers of the jungle border with Brazil.

Argentina occupies 2,780,400 square kilometers, making it the eighth largest country in the world by area and the second largest in South America after Brazil. Its population of approximately 46 million is highly concentrated in a handful of cities, with roughly 15 million people living in the greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area alone. The country is organized as a federal republic with 23 provinces and one autonomous city, Buenos Aires, which serves as the national capital. The official language is Spanish, though the Argentine variety, known as Rioplatense Spanish, is immediately distinct from the Castilian or Latin American Spanish spoken elsewhere, characterized by the unique voseo pronoun system where the second person singular is vos rather than tú, and a musical, Italian-influenced cadence that often surprises visitors expecting a more familiar Spanish accent.

The Argentine peso is the national currency, but the country's economic relationship with money is unlike almost anywhere else in the developed or developing world. Decades of inflation, periodic crises, and complex currency controls have created a parallel informal exchange market, colloquially known as the blue dollar or dólar blue, where the US dollar trades at rates significantly higher than the official bank rate. For travelers, this means that Argentina can be extraordinarily affordable when exchanged at favorable rates, but the system is complex and constantly changing. Under President Javier Milei's administration, which took office in December 2023 with a radical libertarian economic program of shock therapy reforms, the country has been undergoing dramatic economic adjustments, including the unification of exchange rates and significant cuts to state subsidies. Travelers should research current economic conditions carefully before visiting and keep themselves updated on the latest guidance from reliable sources.