History of Buenos AiresHistory & audio guide · Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires had to be founded twice, and almost everything lives in that detail. This special travels the full arc, from 1536 to today. The first founding, Pedro de Mendoza's, ended in hunger, conflict and abandonment: a city that is born… and vanishes. Only the second, Juan de Garay's in 1580, took hold, with its grid layout and its Cabildo. But it began on the margins: a port with its back to an empire that traded through Lima.

Then the city began to look at the Atlantic —the Viceroyalty, the British Invasions— and became the center of a power in dispute: the May Revolution, Rosas, the endless tug-of-war between port and interior. Later it remade itself entirely: capital status in 1880, waves of immigrants, French-style avenues, the agro-export model.

And it kept changing its symbolic owner: the city of masses, the subway, Peronism, the crises, the memory of Plaza de Mayo. That's why the palace and the tenement, tango and politics, the European and the criollo all coexist. Seven chapters to hear how a failed bet became the Queen of the Plate. Walk it while Ruthy tells you the story, standing right there, in no hurry.