Buenos Aires Pictures

Plaza Intendente Alvear, adjacent to Cementario de la Recoleta, Buenos Aires.

Travellers who go to Cementario de la Recoleta at the weekend can also enjoy the pleasant parks immediately around the cemetery that are busy with musicians, families, painters and the biggest craft fair in the city; things are especially buzzing on a Sunday.

Rubber trees in another chunk of Plaza Intendente Alvear, across the road from the main park, Buenos Aires.

Trees are one of the pleasures of Buenos Aires. There are fragrant lavender jacarandas lining many streets in November and December, fat, thorny palo borrachos [drunken branches] around which many legends are woven, and - pictured above - gomeros, vast rubber trees that are considerably healthier than the sad, stunted pot plants seen in many a European home or office.

A vulture's feeding ground; the Palacio del Congreso, Buenos Aires.

The Palacio del Congreso, with a design based on Berlin's Reichstag or Washington's US Capitol building depending on which travel writer you believe, hungrily surveyed by one of the vultures [email from Rolando: I get the sarcastic angle, but you should not confuse the viewer of the photograph with the caption because it is in reality a Condor, bird of prey that inhabits the Andes.] of the Monumento a los Dos Congresos in the middle of the Plaza del Congreso. Free tours in various languages are available Monday-Friday at 11am.

Casa Rosada [Pink House], the Presidential Palace in Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires.

The peculiar colour of the commander-in-chief's home is probably related to the tradition of painting important buildings with a wash composed partly of bull's blood, though some think that the colour was first conceived by President Sarmiento in order to make peace between the Federalists [favourite colour red] and the Unitarists [white]. Free guided tours of the palace are given in English on some afternoons, check time and day locally.

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