San Antonio de Areco

San Antonio de Areco was founded in the eighteenth century on the old road north, and it has never stopped being a country town. Its streets of low colonial houses keep the workshops of silversmiths, leather plaiters and saddlers, the pulperías where the gauchos drank, the church on the plaza and the bridge over the river. Ricardo Güiraldes set Don Segundo Sombra here, and the town has lived up to the novel ever since.

It works as a full day from Buenos Aires: a walk through the centre, visits to the artisans in their workshops, a drink at a pulpería, and then an estancia nearby for riding, gaucho skills and a long asado. Better still is a night at one of the estancias around the town, when the day visitors have gone and the Pampas go quiet. Either way it is the natural counterpoint to the city, and fits at any point of an itinerary that starts or ends in Buenos Aires.

The town works all year. Spring and autumn are the kindest for riding; summer middays are hot. In November Areco celebrates its Day of Tradition, the biggest gaucho gathering in the country.