Buenos Aires historic pub walk

San Telmo is the part of Buenos Aires where the nineteenth-century city is still legible, and these three corners are the reason to walk it slowly.

Bar Británico faces Parque Lezama across Brasil and Defensa, a wood-panelled room on the ground floor of a five-storey block. The city’s guide to its notable bars says it opened under this name in 1928, and that the corner had earlier held a pulpería called La Cosechera — a pulpería being the counter-and-store that did the drinking trade in the old city. It has had a hard century: evicted in June 2006, reopened in February 2007, closed in August 2014 and open again by November of the same year, each time under new management.

Straight up Defensa and one block west, Bar El Federal holds the earliest year on the walk, and it is the press’s year rather than the bar’s — the house publishes nothing a reader can open. La Nación has El Federal born as a pulpería in 1864 on two dirt streets at the corner of Perú and Carlos Calvo, and Perfil, marking 160 years in 2024, follows it from pulpería to almacén de ramos generales and then into the bar it now is. A pulpería sold drink across a counter, which is why we treat the year as a drinking-house date rather than a shop’s, and why this is the only grade B of the three. The city declared it a Sitio de Interés Cultural in 2004. The Italianate corner building it ended up in is late nineteenth-century and the interior early twentieth.

North on Perú to Avenida de Mayo for Los 36 Billares, which prints 1894 at the head of its counter menu — the year the avenue was being cut through the old town. The fabric is younger than the claim by twenty years: the rooms are the ground floor and basement of a block raised in 1914 for the La Franco Argentina insurance company to designs by Tiphaine and Colmegna, so whatever opened in 1894 did not open here. It carries the statutory protection the city legislature created by its Law 35 of 1998, and its parcel is catalogued in the city’s register of historic protection areas — an entry that settles the address, which has been printed three ways, and fixes no date at all. Eight billiard tables more than a century old were restored in 2014, and there is a school in the back room.

The rest of the city is at the oldest bars in Buenos Aires, the country’s at the oldest pubs in Argentina, and why a bar of 1928 belongs on a site about old pubs is answered in the methodology.