On the antique market, the cobbled streets, and the neighbourhood that is oldest by date and closest by character
The San Telmo market runs every Sunday from the Defensa Street opening through to the Plaza Dorrego. By 11am the street is full. By 3pm it is the neighbourhood's. The cobblestones are original; the antiques are of varying honesty.
San Telmo is the oldest of Buenos Aires' neighbourhoods in the sense that it was the first to be settled, on the higher ground above the Río de la Plata, and is still the most legible in its 19th-century urban form. The low buildings, the internal patios, the cobblestone streets on Defensa and the surrounding lanes — these are what the rest of the city lost when it rebuilt itself in the Haussmann and Beaux-Arts modes of the late 19th and early 20th century. San Telmo was too poor to rebuild. It remained itself, and then became valuable for exactly that quality.
The Sunday market runs the length of Defensa Street from the San Telmo market hall north to the Plaza Dorrego. The market hall itself is permanent — stalls of antique silver, military memorabilia, tango memorabilia, and the accumulated domestic objects of a city that has been filling apartments with European furniture for 150 years. The Sunday street market adds vendors of books, prints, leather goods, and the category of objects that are called antiques because no one has decided what else to call them.
Plaza Dorrego, at the market's southern end, is the square where the tango dancing happens on Sundays — not for tourists specifically, though tourists attend, but in the way that Buenos Aires public dance has always happened: in the afternoon, in an open space, with the seriousness of a practice that the city regards as its own. The milonga at the Dorrego starts after the market thins, when the Sunday afternoon belongs to the neighbourhood.
The streets east and west of Defensa are quieter and more residential — the patios visible through open doors, the particular silence of a Buenos Aires Sunday, when the city operates on a different time signature than the rest of the week. The Peña del Parakultural, on one of the side streets, is the neighbourhood's most consistently good tango venue: a small room with a wooden floor and no amplification and the knowledge that the people dancing there are doing it because they need to.
San Telmo in the late afternoon, when the Sunday market has packed up and the street is returned to cobblestones and the late sun, is the Buenos Aires that is most about itself. The neighbourhood was left behind by the city's prosperity and preserved by its own poverty, and then discovered by the people who valued what poverty had preserved. This is the standard story of the old city neighbourhood. San Telmo tells it with the particular warmth of a city that does everything late and at length.