Monday 13 December 2010

Buenos Aires by Lonely Planet

Mix together a beautiful European-like city with attractive residents (call them porteños), gourmet cuisine, awesome shopping, a frenzied nightlife and top-drawer activities, and you get Buenos Aires, a cosmopolitan metropolis with both slick neighborhoods and equally downtrodden areas – but that’s part of the appeal. It’s an elegant, seductive place with a ragged edge, laced with old-world languor and yet full of contemporary attitude. BA is somehow strangely familiar, but unlike any other city in the world. Read more

The world’s greatest bookshops

Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina


It’s grand, it’s splendid, it’s a strong contender to be the world’s most beautiful bookshop. Occupying a 1920s theatre in downtown Buenos Aires, El Ateneo has kept the sumptuous auditorium’s original furnishings – and added books. Beneath the painted ceiling, shelves have been built into the spectator balconies. When you’ve finished gawping at the ornate carvings and it’s time to put finger to page, the former theatre boxes are now intimate reading rooms. There’s a cafe on the stage, between red velvet curtains, and the final firework in the literary spectacle is the round-the-clock opening hours.
Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid is located on the south side of Ave Santa Fe, 50m west of Ave Callao.
by Lonely Planet

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