Qualla: Café Tortoni

Café Tortoni: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a table near the back where a wax figure of Jorge Luis Borges sits forever, pen in hand, as if he had only stepped out and might return any moment. Borges was a regular here in the flesh long before he became a statue, one of countless writers who made the Café Tortoni the unofficial parlor of literary Buenos Aires. Opened in 1858 by a French immigrant named Touan, who borrowed the name from a fashionable café on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, the Tortoni is the oldest coffeehouse in the city and, by one count, among the ten most beautiful in the world. Step through its doors and the century and a half between then and now seems to thin to almost nothing.

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Image: Bernard Gagnon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Café Tortoni: From a Scottish Temple to a Parisian Dream

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Defensoría del Pueblo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, CC BY-SA 4.0. The ground beneath the Tortoni has worn more than one identity. The site it occupies today once held the Templo Escoces, a Scottish temple, and the café itself began life across the block, on the corner of Rivadavia and Esmeralda. It moved to its present location in 1880, though ...

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Image: Defensoría del Pueblo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires | CC BY-SA 4.0

Café Tortoni: La Peña and the Golden Years

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ramon Corvera, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Tortoni's soul lives in its basement. In 1926 a group of artists and writers founded La Pena there, a salon dedicated to protecting the arts and literature, and for seventeen years until its dissolution in 1943 it drew the brightest minds of the Spanish-speaking world. The po...

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Image: Ramon Corvera | CC BY-SA 3.0

Café Tortoni: Where Everyone Came

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leandro Kibisz, CC BY-SA 3.0. The roster of the Tortoni's guests reads like a century of fame distilled into a single room. Carlos Gardel, the tango singer whose voice still defines Argentine longing, drank here. So did the racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio, five times a Formula One world champion. The Spanish...

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Image: Leandro Kibisz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Café Tortoni: A Living Monument

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jrivell, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Tortoni refuses to be a museum. Down in the same basement where La Pena once met, jazz and tango musicians still perform, and the room hosts book launches and poetry contests, the literary life continuing rather than commemorating itself. The main floor keeps its library, and...

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Image: Jrivell | CC BY-SA 3.0