Qualla: Avenida Corrientes

Avenida Corrientes: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luis Argerich, CC BY 2.0. It is past midnight, and the lights are still on. Marquees blaze over a row of theaters, the smell of mozzarella and fugazza drifts out of pizzerias where men eat standing at the counter, and a bookshop stays open for browsers who have nowhere better to be. This is the Avenida Corrientes, the stretch that porteños have always called la calle que nunca duerme - the street that never sleeps. If the Avenida 9 de Julio is the city's broad backbone, Corrientes is its restless, glittering soul, Buenos Aires' own version of Broadway, tangled up with tango and theater and the particular romance of a city that stays awake.

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Image: Luis Argerich | CC BY 2.0

Avenida Corrientes: The Cinema-and-Pizza Ritual

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Spooner, CC BY 2.0. For generations, a night out in Buenos Aires meant Corrientes. In the ten or so blocks west of downtown, between Maipu Street and Avenida Callao, the avenue still holds the city's densest concentration of theaters and cinemas, alongside grand Art Deco movie palaces of the 1930s a...

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Image: John Spooner | CC BY 2.0

Avenida Corrientes: From Narrow Street to Grand Avenue

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit @mrtngrsbch, CC BY 2.0. Corrientes was not always so wide. For most of the nineteenth century it was an ordinary street, bearing older names - Del Sol, then San Nicolas - and never more than average width. As the city boomed and pushed westward in the 1880s, traffic overwhelmed it. A plan to widen it, a...

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Image: @mrtngrsbch | CC BY 2.0

Avenida Corrientes: A Haunt for Poets and Night Owls

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dan DeLuca, CC BY 2.0. By day the avenue belonged to the intellectuals. Through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, writers and artists held court in cafes like the Cafe La Paz, arguing over coffee for hours. Corrientes also became, and remains, the city's great street of bookshops - many of them secondhand, th...

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Image: Dan DeLuca | CC BY 2.0

Avenida Corrientes: Where Tango Lives

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roberto Fiadone, CC BY-SA 3.0. Follow Corrientes far enough west and it carries you through the city's memory. It passes Once, a historically Jewish quarter of synagogues and clothing wholesalers, and reaches Abasto, where a vast Art Deco produce market once stood and where Carlos Gardel - Argentina's greatest...

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Image: Roberto Fiadone | CC BY-SA 3.0