On Buenos Aires's oldest barrio before the antique market opens
The San Telmo antique market on Calle Defensa operates on Sundays from 10am. Before that, the street is a residential lane in one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods, and the light at eight in the morning comes from the east along the cross-streets at an angle that Buenos Aires produces only in this barrio.
The San Telmo antique market on Calle Defensa operates on Sundays from 10am. Before that, the street is a residential lane in one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods, and the light at eight in the morning comes from the east along the cross-streets at an angle that Buenos Aires produces only in this barrio, where the colonial street grid survived the later urban interventions that regularised the rest of the city.
San Telmo was the city's elite neighbourhood in the 17th and 18th centuries. The yellow fever epidemic of 1871 drove the wealthy to the north — to Recoleta and Palermo — and left the colonial houses in San Telmo to be subdivided into the conventillos (shared tenement buildings) that housed the immigrant population arriving from Italy and Spain in the following decades. The houses are still subdivided; many are still tenements. The antique market and the restaurants have moved into the ground floors of the same buildings, and the palimpsest of wealth, poverty, and commerce is visible in the tiles and the cornices and the paint coming off the plaster.
Walk Calle Defensa from north to south before 10am. The street at this hour is quiet enough to see the colonial facades clearly. The Mercado de San Telmo, the 1897 iron-framed covered market on the block between Calles Estados Unidos and Carlos Calvo, is open from 8am — the food stalls inside are the neighbourhood's daily market, not the artisan economy of the Sunday traders who set up in the afternoon. The coffee at the counter in the interior is Argentine espresso served in a glass with a small pitcher of water.
The Plaza Dorrego, at the southern end of Defensa, is where the main Sunday market sets up — the dealers in antique silverware, mate gourds, military badges, and mid-century furniture who have been here since the 1970s. By 10am the tourists are present and the market is in full performance. By 9:45 it is still being arranged. At 8:30 you can see the dealers drinking their own coffee and reading the paper and paying no attention to anyone who is not a serious buyer.