On the Buenos Aires establishments protected by city ordinance — what a culture decides is worth preserving, and what it looks like from the inside
In 1998, the city of Buenos Aires passed an ordinance protecting seventy-one establishments as Bares Notables — notable bars of cultural, historical, or architectural significance. The list has since grown. It is an unusual civic act: the legal protection of a way of spending an afternoon.
In 1998, the city of Buenos Aires passed an ordinance protecting seventy-one establishments as Bares Notables — notable bars of cultural, historical, or architectural significance. The list has since grown to over a hundred. The ordinance prohibits the destruction of protected interiors without municipal approval, which in practice means that a city government has decided to defend the specific materials and proportions of rooms where people have been drinking coffee and wine for between fifty and a hundred and fifty years. It is an unusual civic act: the legal protection of a way of spending an afternoon.
Bar Británico, on the corner of Brasil and Defensa in San Telmo, has been open continuously since 1928. The interior is its original interior — the bar in dark wood, the marble tables, the leather banquettes, the mirrors that multiply the room without enlarging it. The establishment served as the setting for conversations that mattered to the intellectual and political culture of the city across most of the twentieth century; it continued to operate through the years when such conversations required care about where they were held. The coffee here is not notable. The room is.
El Federal, also in San Telmo, was established in 1864 and is one of the oldest continuously operating bars in the city. The bar top is the original bar top; the carved wooden shelving behind it is the original shelving. The building occupies a corner that has been a commercial premise since the mid-nineteenth century, and the succession of owners has maintained a remarkable consistency of purpose: serve the neighbourhood what it needs, at prices it can pay, without unnecessary change. The lunch menu changes by season. The room does not.
La Biela in Recoleta occupies a different register — the terrace under the enormous rubber tree on the Avenida Quintana serves the neighbourhood that surrounds the Recoleta Cemetery, which means a clientele drawn from Buenos Aires's professional and cultural class, with the foreign visitors who have found their way to the neighbourhood mixed in at the outdoor tables. The interior, protected and largely unchanged since the 1950s, is where the Argentine racing drivers who patronised it in its formative decades would still recognise themselves, if the photographs on the wall are any guide.
The Bares Notables programme does not protect every old bar in Buenos Aires — the city has too many, and the selection process involves the Bureau of Cultural Heritage making judgements about which interiors, which histories, and which ongoing presences in the urban fabric rise to the level of protection. What the programme does is make legible a value judgement that the city has held implicitly for as long as these places have been open: that a good bar, serving its neighbourhood across generations, is a form of public infrastructure. The protected establishments do not advertise their status. They do not need to.