Buenos Aires Private Walking Tours

Local Expat Guides of Buenos Aires

All of us guides here at BuenosTours are expats living long-term in Buenos Aires, who are originally from the UK and the US. This means you get the best of both worlds when booking with one of our guides:

1.) A local who knows Buenos Aires inside out and can tell you the best of the city as an insider so that you make the most of your time here

But ALSO:

2.) Someone who is an English-speaking NATIVE, like you, so you can be assured that you will understand everything they say. You have no guarantee that Argentine tour companies will have guides that speak a high level of English, so why take the risk? Also, having a guide who was born into your culture, but who has also lived in Buenos Aires as a local does, means that you have someone who acts as a bridge between two cultures - we will help you to understand the history and culture of Buenos Aires and Argentina, because we have seen things from both sides.

Tour Reservations Policy

• To make things easier for our clients, we now accept payment for tours by credit or debit card. You can either pay the full price of the tour by card up front, to be safe in the knowledge that your tour is set in stone and all you have to do is wait at your accommodation at the agreed time to be met by your expert guide, or pay a small deposit up front, and then the balance of the fee at the time of the tour.
• All credit/debit card payments and deposits to us are processed through Google Checkout or Paypal. By using these market-leading online payment systems, from two of the biggest and most respected internet companies around, you can be sure your payment and details are 100% safe, secure and private at all times. It is also possible if you request for us to take your card details over the phone to process your payment – in this case we will never store your card details after the payment has taken place.
• We offer a 100% satisfaction money-back guarantee for all of our walking tours

Private Walking Tours on Offer

In addition to our most popular and well-received tour, the 3 hour walking tour of the historical city center of Buenos Aires, we also have the following offerings to help you make the most of your time in Buenos Aires:

Buenos Aires Day Tour

1.) This is the must see/do tour of Buenos Aires. Our most complete tour. Approximately 7 hours of touring to the most important areas of the city:

- San Telmo, the atmospheric home of tango, immigrant history, antiques, cobblestone streets and colonial architecture
- Monserrat, the oldest barrio in the city, full of beautiful churches
- The City Center, including the most important historical sites in Buenos Aires, like the Casa Rosada/Pink House, Plaza de Mayo, the Cathedral and the oldest subway line in the southern hemisphere
- A coffee/restroom break at Cafe Tortoni, the oldest and most ornate cafe in the city, founded way back in 1858
- Plaza San Martin, the most peaceful and beautiful square in the city, which has historical suprises lurking in every corner
- Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest road in the world, and home to the Buenos Aires Obelisk monument
- Lunch at a traditional Argentine restaurant together with your guide – at the kind of place where the locals eat, with a choice of tasty dishes that will have all tastes covered.
- Recoleta, the most prestigious area of the city, full of mansions and high class establishments, where we will stroll along upscale Avenida Alvear
- Recoleta Cemetery, last resting place of Evita Peron and many other rich and famous Argentines, plus the highest concentration of beautiful architecture and sculpture in the city.

This is a walking tour with some public transport involved, so it will be a pretty exerting (but healthy!) day – please note this before booking. However, exploring through walking and public transport is really the best method to see the city up close and personal, as the locals would, rather than opting for being herded around on an impersonal bus city/day tour of Buenos Aires.

Price: 200 US Dollars for small groups (of 1 to 3 people) and 300 US Dollars for medium groups (of 4 to 7 people). These prices are the total for the group, NOT PER PERSON. Note – transport to and from the tour is not included in the price, nor is any money you spend on refreshments or food for yourselves during the tour. However, travel, food and refreshments are very cheap in Buenos Aires, and the place we have carefully selected for lunch is very reasonable, even by local standards. The scheduled start time for this tour is 9.30am, however, as it is a private tour, you can request an earlier or later start if that suits you better. Please complete the following form to make a booking inquiry for this day tour:

Please use the following link to read about our other tour offerings and services:

Read the rest of this entry »

Great Press For BuenosTours!

As you might have guessed from the lack of blog posts around here recently, we’ve been working hard giving lots of walking tours around Buenos Aires. And it’s certainly paying off, with some good press coming in from both traditional and modern publishing formats…

This weekend we were recommend by the Guardian newspaper (one of the UK’s most widely read dailies) in their article on The Five Best Cemetery Tours, in which they listed BuenosTours and our tour of Recoleta Cemetery (plus surrounding areas) first – I guess making us the best cemetery tour in the world! (TM)

if you want to book the “best cemetery tour in the world” with us, click here and scroll down to the “Recoleta & Retiro tour” heading for more information.

And some Podcasting love too…

But the recommendations don’t stop there. BuenosTours also has fans living in the high-tech age. The podcast guys over at For Whatever Reason yesterday posted up their latest episode, including a long feature on the recent walking tour of Buenos Aires city center they took with us and how much they enjoyed it. Thanks guys! Just to quickly quote a few things they said about the tour in the podcast:

“This walking tour was possibly the best thing that we did on the entire trip”

“A great way to get a feel for everything and learn a lot about the area”

“Most people booked a tour of Buenos Aires, most of them booked a bus tour where they got on a bus and somebody with a loudspeaker talked as they drove through different parts of the city. The tour that we booked was actually a private walking tour and so it was just the tour guide, and me, and Tim… It was wonderful, we had a lot of one-on-one time, or two-on-one time, with him, we could ask questions without feeling like we were interrupting someone else’s tour, we didn’t have other people interrupting what we felt like was our tour, and having been on lots of tour type situations that’s always the case where… you just feel like the experience isn’t what you want it to be, where this was what we wanted it to be, and it was so perfect.”

“He was very knowledgable in history – he had funny stories, he had tragic stories, he had everything inbetween.”

“It gave us a great sense of comfort to walk around the streets… in fact I stopped him about 10 minutes into the tour and said thank you… because this is the first time I have done any kind of international travel… and you’ve helped me realize that this isn’t any different than home, it’s just a different city.”

You can listen to the episode here: For Whatever Reason on BuenosTours (the part about Buenos Aires and BuenosTours starts at about 16 minutes in).

(And stick around to listen to some more of their stuff, because it’s pretty cool, plus they have great radio voices! Also, check out their Buenos Aires photo album on Flickr, with photos from their walking tour, including a couple of rather unfortunate ones of yours truly…)

Finally, you can click here to book the private guided city center walking tour they took!

Now were just waiting on that long-promised Oprah endorsement, and we’re all set…

[Second photo credit: Javier Kohen @ Flickr]

See the sights of Buenos Aires’ historical city center…

Just a quick note to let everyone know that, now we’re officially in Spring, I am once again offering private, guided, walking tours of Buenos Aires City Center. These sightseeing tours cover the main attractions in the historical center of the city, such as Plaza de Mayo, Avenida de Mayo, Plaza Congreso, the Casa Rosada, the Cathedral, Cafe Tortoni, and a whole lot more.

CLICK HERE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND TOUR BOOKING DETAILS.

Hope to see you soon!

Humberto Primo 1462 (between San Jose & Saenz Pena), San Telmo

La Milonga de los Consagrados – Useful information

Saturday afternoons 4.30pm-10.30pm; Entrance fee of 10 pesos; Reservations: 15-5892-2056.

Reservations are really necessary unless you attend alone, and then they can squeeze you in someplace. Usually this tango salon is full (more than 300 people) by 8.00pm.

La Milonga de los Consagrados is organized by Enrique “Gordo” Rosich, and although it is officially in the barrio of Constitucion, it would probably be referred to as San Telmo by most (official barrio borders are largely ignored in Buenos Aires).

Same venues, different milongas…

As I pointed out in my overview on Tango in Buenos Aires, even if a milonga is in the same salon as another, each milonga will still have its own character depending on the day of the week, the organizer, the crowd, and if it’s in the afternoon or at night.

Los Consagrados is in the same salon as the famous Nino Bien of Thursday nights (in the wonderful Centro Region Leonesa), but it is a totally different experience. And to my mind, the best afternoon milonga of the week. The fact that it’s held on Saturday afternoons, the traditional “difficult” day for singles, makes it even more of a plus…

Read the rest of this entry »

Buenos Aires City Government Tourism Portal Launches blogs in English and Spanish

I’ve just seen on Pasa en Buenos Aires [ES] that the Buenos Aires Government Tourism Portal has launched two new blogs about tourism in the city of Buenos Aires, one in English, and one in Spanish.

Read the rest of this entry »