My surprising budget break in Buenos Aires

With the pound still buying wads of Argentinian pesos, Chris Moss spends a week in the city of £5 steaks, £1 coffees and £3 nights at the opera

EBuenos Aires is a city that lavishes pleasures and experiences on visitors

very destination has culinary classics that serve as yardsticks to measure quality of experience and value for money. In England it is a pint of ale and a full English. In Spain it is a paella and a fino sherry. In Argentina, it has to be a steak blow-out. I lived in Buenos Aires for a decade, so I have done my fair share of beef, and parrillas (grill restaurants) have come and gone. Right now, my favourite is El Secretito, which is away from the touristy centre, has an upstairs terrace opening to the street and serves wellcharred high-grade cuts.

A lunch with an old friend, consisting of a chorizo sausage and black pudding starter (known here as a “matrimonio”), two huge steaks, chips in garlic sauce, salad, two bottles of malbec and two ice-cream desserts cost us 14,000 Argentinian pesos.

That is £76 split between two, which isn’t bad at all. But, paying in cash, it was in fact £42 between two – which is amazing (on the way out, a so-so bar at Heathrow was charging £21 for a single glass of gavi). You see, Argentina has both official and unofficial exchange rates. The more generous one is a black market rate, which Argentines, who prefer their euphemisms not to sound too criminal, call the “blue dollar”. It applies not only to holders of US dollars but also those with pounds or euros.

The other reason Argentina is so cheap is because, if the UK is currently in the economic doldrums, this country has been there for decades. Last month, Britons panicked when it looked like pound sterling was heading for dollar parity. Argentines dream of dollar parity; they actually had it for 10 years until 2001 – but when the peso was uncoupled, it crashed and the economy tanked. Even now, when British holiday money has shrunk in value everywhere else, our pound has stayed strong in Argentina. It has quadrupled in value over the past four years and even now is up around 25 per cent since late 2021.

Buenos Aires is a city that lavishes pleasures and experiences on visitors. Its legendary café culture is a good place to start. I popped in to a couple of old favourites – Bar Lavalle and La Academia – just to watch the world go by. These so-called “cafés notables” are about atmosphere, ideal for reading or scribbling a diary. I also sampled some of the more trendy coffee bars, where, to be honest, the brews taste better. Tuo Tempo on Avenida Corrientes and Volta on Avenida del Libertador did good cortados. At all these places, I never paid more than £1.20, with a glass of sparkling water and a biscuit thrown in for free.

The excellent Museo de Bellas Artes was free. Recoleta Cemetery – the most impressive necropolis in the Americas and final resting place of many presidents, national heroes and Eva Perón – has just started charging. At £4.20 it is still well worth it. One of my favourite small museums – the former home of tango singer Carlos Gardel – charges just £1.50 for foreign visitors.

A tango class at La Viruta – a communal session and more fun than other places – cost just £2.10, or £2.70 for the popular Saturday event. I always take a class when in town. I never improve.

Just about everything that makes a holiday a joy is affordable or dirt cheap. Bus, train and underground travel, using a Sube card – including a train ride from the Retiro terminus out to Tigre, on the river delta – cost pennies per journey. A 10-minute taxi back to my hotel following the epic steak-fest cost £1.20. As for the hotel, the rather swanky Palladio Mgallery on Avenida Callao – central enough to walk downtown, or into Recoleta and Palermo – there are rooms online at £72. Most hotels prefer to keep to dollars on their rack rates, but they still work in pesos when it comes to wages and overheads, so there are amazing deals to be had. Leaving aside ultra-luxury properties like the Alvear Palace and Faena, there are excellent rooms available across the city from £50 per night.

Food in the better hotels is often excellent. This usually luxury option is well within reach in Buenos Aires. After the long flight, I needed a lazy night in and a healthy supper. The Palladio had a reviving quinoa and avocado salad for £9 and fish dishes for £12.

What else do you need for a city break? I’m not one for tango shows, but a night at Senõr Tango, a glitzy dance spectacle, costs £75, but that includes dinner. A tour of the Teatro Colón costs £5.50, and a ticket for an OK seat at Tosca an absurdly cheap £3. Souvenirs are also not my strong point, but leather gear is good in Argentina, and a stylish poncho from posh gaucho-style clothing shop Arandu costs just £45. A “Pampa” belt cost less than half that.

I could go on. Actually, I will, just to mention that two other Argentine classics are a breakfast of coffee with a medialuna (sweet croissant), which is widely available for £1.35, and empanadas, a pasty smaller but tastier than the Cornish variety, which cost around 35p apiece.

All of which makes BA the perfect winter escape (it is 25C now, and getting hotter) – even for a pound-poor visitor. But bear in mind, the way to take advantage of the exchange rate bonus is to bring cash, ideally US dollars. Using ATMs incurs hefty charges. Also, bring $100 notes as the rate is better for these; the casas de cambio don’t want smaller bills for some obscure reason. It’s also not advisable to pay using debit or credit cards as banks will process the bills at the official rate, though there has recently been a government announcement that overseas-issued cards will be charged at the “Dólar MEP” rate – even higher than the blue-dollar rate – to bring dollars into the national coffers.

If you find all this money stuff fascinating rather than confusing, then be sure to visit two very special local museums. The Museum of External Debt commemorates the country’s defaults and tussles with the IMF, and the times when Argentine supermarket shoppers ran ahead of the employee with the price-tag machine, just to get a tin of soup at yesterday’s price. The Museo Numismatico gives the full lowdown on all the different types of money used over the years – from the grand old pesos of the 1920s, when Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, to the austral of the 1980s, which was eventually phased out because there was no more space to add zeros on the notes. My first salary in 1991 was two million australs per month.

In the 19th century, Argentina had some of its notes printed in Europe. One

arrived with images of kangaroos on one side. The explanation was that the country was antipodean, so there had to be kangaroos. These days, it is the economy that is upside down – but these sunny days of generous exchange rates won’t last (nothing is permanent in Argentina), so go soon, while the steaks and wine are cheaper than burgers and bottled water in the UK and a night at the opera costs less than a night in with the heating on.