Touched by a Tango in Buenos Aires : Visitors can feel the cavalier spirit while strolling along lively city streets.

In Buenos Aires, you want to see and hear the tango, Argentina’s sensual, bittersweet lament to an imperfect world. So much the better, then, when Humphrey Bogart and George Raft, their hair slicked back in the gangster style of the ‘30s, suddenly materialize before you to star in an impromptu performance beneath the shady limbs of a giant rubber tree.

It was one of those little coincidences that make travel a delight. As we sat down for our last lunch at one of the city’s many sidewalk cafes, I grumbled to my wife that I had not heard a note of tango, the South American nation’s most famous cultural export. But before the waiter had served our beers, a vagabond troupe appeared and the show was on.

Tango, the still slightly lascivious dance to a primitive beat, flourished in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and the performers entertaining the chic Sunday lunch crowd were attired in period fashions. The singer, an older man I had no trouble imagining as Raft, sported a white dinner jacket. The male dancer, the Bogart look-alike, was dapper in a turned-down gray fedora and a white scarf at his neck. His blond partner, who might have stepped from an early Bogart film, wore a tight miniskirt and a big blue flower at her chest. A guitarist and accordionist provided the music.

A tango for the tourists, maybe. But I don’t think so. We were dining at La Biela, a fancy outdoor cafe on Calle Junin in Recoleta, a well-to-do neighborhood just north of the city center. Eva Peron, the near legendary “Evita,” is buried in the cemetery across the street. All around us sat Portenos, the residents of the port city of Buenos Aires. They bantered with the musicians, laughed at the singer’s jokes and sent their children forward with coins to drop in an open guitar case. An hour passed, then much of another before we left, and by then I’d seen so much tango I sort of tangoed my way down the street, to my wife’s grinning embarrassment.

Buenos Aires is a grand city, an elegant and sophisticated transplant from Europe. To stroll its old streets, as we did for several days last March, is to think you might somehow have boarded the wrong plane and landed instead in Paris or Milan or Madrid. Argentina was settled by waves of European immigrants, and they turned to the Old World for inspiration--for the expansive green parks, broad tree-shaded avenues, a magnificent opera house and all those sidewalk cafes--when they built their capital. A while back, I lived and traveled in South America for almost a year, and to my ear the Portenos speak Spanish with an Italian lilt because of the Italian influx.

But Buenos Aires has its own complex personality, one that is often exuberant to match the gloriously outsized steaks a waiter plops on your plate, yet moody at times, as reflected in the gloomy lyrics of many a tango tune. At the turn of the century, the city was a booming agricultural port, and as the money rolled in, it blossomed architecturally and culturally. But recent decades of economic and political turmoil have taken their toll on the people, who are understandably dubious about the future, and on their city, which has developed a shabby patina.

Yet a certain devil-may-care spirit predominates, and there is a sociable bustle to Buenos Aires that I find appealing. Throngs spill into the streets from morning until, well, early the next morning. Based only on my observations, I am convinced that Portenos are among the world’s most eager snackers. Every block is lined with places to eat--cafes, coffeehouses called confiterias , restaurants, steakhouses, tea shops, snack bars--and they are almost always filled. Everybody seems to be on a nonstop coffee break, catching up with the day’s gossip.

Admittedly an out-of-the-way destination, Buenos Aires is one of the highlights of many packaged tours of South America. I have an interest in Spanish American history, so I flew down in part to pay homage to Jose de San Martin, the Argentine revolutionary leader whose tomb is in the city’s cathedral. In the early 1800s, San Martin helped crush Spanish domination of much of the continent, a colonial rule that began soon after Christopher Columbus’ voyages to the New World 500 years ago.

Beyond a compelling but somber history, Buenos Aires offers visitors the same sort of cosmopolitan delights that entice North Americans to Europe--at substantially lower prices. We toured the art museums, browsed the galleries, gaped at the architectural splendor around us, shopped for inexpensive leather goods, people-watched from park benches, sipped fine Argentine wines, snacked on pastries and dined nightly (at 10 p.m., as Portenos do) on platter-size steaks that cost no more than $20 per person for a full meal, everything included.

Those steakhouses, called parrillas , are easy to spot, which I discovered when we took a walk down busy Calle Lavalle. As we passed a restaurant named La Estancia, I glanced toward its window. There I saw a pair of open-pit charcoal fires glowing brightly. Hunks of beef and pork and whole chickens were being grilled at windowside, a very effective gimmick to tempt prospective diners.

With a population of about 10 million, Buenos Aires is a large city. But much of what a visitor will want to see and do is located in its fairly compact heart along the shoreline of the broad Rio de La Plata, the port’s access to the Atlantic. We went sightseeing almost everywhere on foot, although sometimes we returned to our hotel by taxi (they are moderately priced) at the end of a long day.

The best introduction to Buenos Aires, I think, is a walk down famous Calle Florida, a 10-block-long pedestrian mall lined with some of the city’s finest shops and several cafes. We were staying at the Elevage, a small, European-style hotel just around the corner from Plaza San Martin, Calle Florida’s northern end. No sooner had we checked into the Elevage than we were back out again and headed for Florida to drink in the sights. A good many of the city’s residents already were there.

Essentially, Florida is a street of commerce, but Portenos have made it as much a gathering place for political and social debate and a sideshow. Mimes, jugglers and other street performers vie for attention with eager volunteers staffing makeshift tables set up to solicit contributions to charitable or political causes. If a shopkeeper catches your eye, you are apt to be invited in to inspect his merchandise. Leather goods stores seem to predominate at the northern end of the walkway. I popped inside one to look at a leather jacket that caught my eye--a bargain, I thought, at about $110.

On its arrow-straight path south, Florida crosses two lively streets--Avenida Corrientes, where small bookstores and cafes flourish, and Calle Lavalle, a neon pedestrian corridor lined by numerous restaurants and movie theaters. At Florida’s southern end is the Plaza de Mayo, the city’s principal square. The plaza is dominated by the Casa Rosada, the whimsically pink-hued building that houses the offices of the Argentine president. The guards standing outside, dressed in colorful 19th-Century uniforms, looked like toy soldiers in front of a candy castle. But I couldn’t forget that some former administrations have been brutally repressive, and Argentina is no fairy-tale land.

The history buff in me found it a nice touch that Calle Florida, the soul of the old city, links Plaza San Martin and its heroic statue of the leader on horseback with Plaza de Mayo, where he is entombed in the cathedral. Plaza San Martin is a sprawling green park filled with flowering trees, among them the exotic palo borracho or “drunken stick,” so named because its pink blossoms are supported by a distinctively shaped trunk. The Plaza de Mayo is more formal, as befits the site of the Casa Rosada and the 18th-Century cathedral. The cathedral’s 12 tall pillars across the front give it the look of a Greek temple. Inside, two more guards in bright garb stand watch over San Martin’s tomb.

On the far side of the Casa Rosada, facing the river, is Plaza Colon. The centerpiece is a marble statue of Columbus, standing atop a high pedestal. I felt obligated to pay a courtesy call on Columbus, although I’m well aware he is under attack for the havoc his voyages ultimately brought the peoples and environment of the New World. He was a man with great faults, we are told, but because of him and the Spanish monarchy that financed his explorations, Argentina and much of the rest of the continent share a Spanish heritage. One need not honor Columbus to acknowledge his impact, for better and worse.

Perhaps the most architecturally interesting street in Buenos Aires is Avenida de Mayo, a broad thoroughfare running east and west that connects the Casa Rosada, the seat of the presidency, with the National Congress building on the Plaza de Congreso. The busy avenue is the result of a massive urban renewal project undertaken in the 1890s to create a monumental street. Its ornate buildings, an eclectic mix of baroque and rococo, are primarily French-inspired, but scattered among them are several lovely representatives of the graceful art nouveau style of the 1920s.

Though Buenos Aires is an old city, founded on riverfront flatlands in 1580, not much of its Spanish-colonial past remains standing. In its first two centuries, the city was mostly a backwater village vastly overshadowed by the gold-rich viceroyalty of Peru to the north. Only after independence in the 19th Century, as the nation prospered from beef, sheep and agricultural exports, did the city really begin to build in earnest and take on its present-day Old World appearance.

Museum-going in Buenos Aires is rewarding but hampered by irregular hours, which seem never to match what the guidebooks say. Three times I tried to visit El Cabildo, which faces the Casa Rosada on Plaza de Mayo. A historical monument, it is the site where independence from Spain was declared in 1810. But it was never open, even though a sign said it was supposed to be. Oh, well, two other museums more than made up for the loss.

My favorite proved to be the little Museum of Hispanic-American Art at 1422 Calle Suipacha, as much for the fine artworks it contains as the beautiful Spanish-colonial style mansion in which it is housed. Built in 1925, the building is only a copy, of course, but you wouldn’t know unless told. The whitewashed walls, red-tile roof, stone-floored patio and quiet garden with its burbling tiled fountain, mirror the finest old homes of Seville in southern Spain, where the conquest of the continent was launched.

The exhibits are an intriguing mix of the rich handicrafts developed by the Spanish colonists--religious artifacts handworked in silver, a beautifully painted old desk trimmed with gilt, elaborately carved chests inlaid with mother-of-pearl and colorful tiles and ceramics. The most curious was a display of the fancy hair combs that Spanish women once used to hold their lace mantillas in place. One crescent-shaped comb, elaborately filigreed, stretched for almost two feet. It would have made an impressive crown.

In startling contrast is the Municipal Museum of Modern Art at 350 Calle San Juan in San Telmo, a trendy neighborhood of art galleries, antique shops, cafes, cabarets and late-night tango bars. (I had vowed to visit a tango bar, but I couldn’t manage to stay awake after a 10 p.m. dinner.) One of the oldest parts of Buenos Aires, San Telmo is just to the south of Plaza de Mayo, but the museum is too far for a comfortable walk. We flagged a taxi for the five-minute, $2 ride.

The museum exhibits the works of modern Argentine artists in many media--painting, sculpture and weaving, among them. I found the pieces to be more interesting than appealing. They were universally dark and somber. No dash of color delighted the eye, nor whimsy, and I couldn’t detect a single expression of hope in any of them. Almost certainly they reflect the tragic years of the nation’s military dictatorship, from 1976 to 1982, when many opponents of the government were detained and then disappeared, not to be seen alive again.

After this unsettling visit, we opted for a more upbeat look at city life, which we found at El Caminito, a gaily painted street in the Italian neighborhood of La Boca. La Boca, the old port of Buenos Aires, is just south of San Telmo and famous for its cantinas and other nightlife. For about a block, the walls harboring El Caminito (“TheLittle Road”) have been painted in bold splashes of bright colors, and artists gather daily beneath striped awnings to sell their cityscapes.

Time was running out on us, but we still had one more afternoon to squeeze in a final neighborhood tour to ritzy Recoleta, several blocks north of Plaza San Martin. It is an area of upscale shops, acres of parklands, the National Museum of Fine Arts (closed during the month of our visit), Recoleta Cemetery (where the black marble crypt of Eva Peron still draws crowds), and the outdoor cafes of Calle Junin.

We had scurried about so much during our short stay in Buenos Aires that we really hadn’t indulged all that much in the Porteno ritual of coffee and conversation in a pleasant cafe. So I was inclined to linger with the local folk when we finally sat down for lunch and beer beneath the rubber tree at La Biela.

There is something to be said for taking a break when you are touring. You might even get a chance to learn the tango. My wife still kids me about my little impromptu dance down the street from the cafe, but I thought I displayed some nifty footwork.

GUIDEBOOK

Buenos Aires

When to go: Buenos Aires has a generally moderate climate year-round, although summers can sometimes be hot and humid, and winters cool. January and February, the South American summer, are the warmest months. The fall--March, April and May--is regarded as the most pleasant time to visit, and that’s when the cultural season resumes.

Getting there: American Airlines (800-433-7300), Aerolineas Argentinas (800-333-0276) and VASP Airlines of Brazil (800-732-8277) offer direct service from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires. American and Aerolineas stop in Miami, while VASP stops in Rio de Janeiro. Through June 20, with 14-day advance purchase, American and Aerolineas Argentinas are quoting a round-trip fare of $1,350 from LAX to Buenos Aires. Path Tours (12444 Victory Blvd., Suite 407, North Hollywood 91606, 800-843-0400 or 818-980-4442) offers a Buenos Aires package that includes eight days, breakfast daily, air fare from LAX, airport transfers and guided half-day sightseeing tour starting at about $1,000 per person, double occupancy ($200 extra for singles).

Where to stay: Buenos Aires is a cosmopolitan city with excellent accommodations in a variety of price categories. We stayed at the Elevage, a small 90-room European-style hotel excellently located just off Plaza San Martin in an area of fine shops and restaurants. It is a deluxe property with a small courtyard swimming pool. A room for two is about $155 a night, which includes taxes, service charge and a generous continental breakfast with plenty of fresh fruit. Call (800) 448-8355.

For more information: Contact the Argentine Government Tourist Office, 3550 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1450, Los Angeles 90010, (213) 736-5232.