As Calle Florida became an elegant shopping district in the late 19th century, Francisco Seeber and Emilio Bunge were the main shareholders in the proposed Bon Marché Argentino, inspired by Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emmanuelle II. Unfortunately, their French investors backed out, but Seeber resurrected the project by 1894 as the Galería Florida.

Six days a week, Plaza Dorrego is a quiet shady square where porteños sip cortados and nibble lunches from nearby cafés. On weekends, though, it swarms with Argentine and foreign visitors who stroll among dozens of antiques stalls at the Feria de San Pedro Telmo, the most famous and colorful of the capital’s numerous street fairs. Items range from antique soda siphons to brightly painted filete plaques with piropos (aphorisms), oversized antique radios, and many other items.

For the living and dead alike, Recoleta is Buenos Aires’s prestige address. Its roster of cadavers represents wealth and power as surely as the residents of its Francophile mansions and luxury apartment towers hoard their assets in overseas bank accounts. Arguably, the cemetery is even more exclusive than the neighborhood—enough cash can buy an impressive residence, but not a surname such as Alvear, Anchorena, Mitre, Pueyrredón, or Sarmiento.

Buenos Aires’s second cemetery may be more affordable than Recoleta, but eternity at the Cementerio de la Chacarita can still mean notoriety. Its residents include high-profile Argentines in fields ranging from entertainment to religion and politics—and the lines between these categories are not always obvious.

Eva Perón became famous for her visit to Europe in 1947 when, as representative of an Argentina that emerged from World War II as an economic powerhouse, she helped legitimize a shaky Franco regime in Spain and, despite missteps, impressed other war-ravaged European countries with Argentina’s potential. But even her death, five years later, did not stop her from touring.

Millions of Argentines said adios to Evita in a cortege that took hours to travel up Avenida de Mayo from the Casa Rosada to the Congreso Nacional, where her corpse lay in state.

When Berkeley grad student Mariano Ben Plotkin arrived in Buenos Aires on vacation, his aunt questioned him about California’s cost of living, which she found astonishingly cheap. On hearing his item-by-item accounting, the porteña psychoanalyst commented, “Oh, now I understand—there you don’t need to budget for psychoanalysis.”

There’s a correntino gaucho on every corner in Mercedes, which is also the gateway to the world-class wetlands of the Esteros del Iberá, an ecological jewel that occupies much of the province’s geographical center. Because of bus schedules to the marshes, travelers without their own vehicles often have to spend a night here.

Until very recently, Roman Catholicism was Argentina’s official faith, and it still permeates daily life. When the shepherd fails the flock, though, the people seek help from popular saints like the Difunta Correa—whose shrine draws upwards of 100,000 Semana Santa pilgrims to the desert hamlet of Vallecito, about 60 kilometers east of San Juan.

More than a religious experience, it’s an economic force, and even nonbelievers will find plenty to contemplate in the contradictions between the sacred and the profane.

Though it’s barely a wide spot in the road, Cholila has become an offbeat pilgrimage site ever since U.S. author Anne Meadows pinpointed the house of yanqui outlaws Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh in her historical travelogue Digging Up Butch and Sundance (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2003). Bruce Chatwin also told of the Cholila cabin—perhaps taking literary license—in his classic In Patagonia.

Turning everyone else’s trash into lighthearted objets d’art, Joaquín Alonso’s magnum opus is a whimsical labor of love by a man seemingly incapable of throwing anything away. In the process, he’s created credible mural replicas of works by Florencio Molina Campos, Benito Quinquela Martín, and even Pablo Picasso (Guernica).

The most amusing single item may be the palo borracho (a pun on northern Argentina’s spiny Chorisia speciosa tree, colloquially known as “drunken stick” because of its water-swollen trunk). The leaves of this drunken stick, though, are beer and wine bottles.