Boutique Hotels in Buenos Aires

 The city is best understood barrio by barrio. Palermo, the largest, is its creative heart, split into Palermo Soho — boutiques, cafés, street art and nightlife — and Palermo Hollywood for the best of the restaurants, all wrapped around the lakes and rose garden of the Bosques de Palermo. To the east, elegant Recoleta wears its French-style architecture and its astonishing cemetery, where Evita and the city's grandees lie in marble streets of mausoleums. South lies San Telmo, the oldest barrio: cobbled, antique-filled and tango-haunted, at its best for the Sunday Feria de San Telmo along Calle Defensa and the street dancing on Plaza Dorrego.

The set-pieces are downtown and along the river. In the Microcentro stand Plaza de Mayo and the pink Casa Rosada, the grand Avenida de Mayo and the opulent Teatro Colón, one of the world's great opera houses; nearby, El Ateneo Grand Splendid turns a 1919 theatre into the most beautiful bookshop on earth. Puerto Madero, the regenerated docklands, offers riverside walking and the Ecological Reserve, while colourful La Boca, with its painted houses, the Caminito and Boca Juniors, is a vivid daytime visit. It is a vast, flat, walkable city, knitted together by a cheap subte and a thousand cafés.

 To eat in Buenos Aires is to eat beef, gloriously and often. The parrilla — the steakhouse — is the city's temple, where bife de chorizo and entraña arrive with chimichurri and a bottle of Mendoza Malbec, after a starter of provoleta and empanadas; the asado, the slow Argentine barbecue, is the ritual behind it. But the city eats far wider too: Italian-rooted pasta and pizza, the choripán from a street cart, medialunas with morning coffee in a historic café, and dulce de leche in everything from alfajores to ice cream. And it eats late — book dinner for nine or ten, not seven.

Then there is tango, the city's heartbeat: see it staged in a grand show, watch it free on a San Telmo Sunday, or — best of all — find a milonga and watch porteños dance it for themselves. For where to stay, the club's choices map the city: Home Hotel and Hotel Pulitzer in the bars and design shops of Palermo and the central Microcentro; the theatrical Faena in the riverside towers of Puerto Madero; and Casa Lucia in a landmark 1929 skyscraper on the Retiro–Recoleta border. Pick the barrio, and the city follows.

Buenos Aires sits in the southern hemisphere, so its seasons are reversed, and spring and autumn are the loveliest times to come. Spring, September to November, brings warm days and the lilac haze of the jacarandas in bloom across the city; autumn, March to May, is mild, golden and arguably the ideal season, with the summer heat gone and the cafés spilling onto the pavements. Summer, December to February, is hot and humid and emptier, as porteños decamp to the coast — quieter for visiting, if sticky. Winter, June to August, is cool but rarely cold, grey and atmospheric, and the best value of the year. For blue skies, warm evenings and the city in full swing, come in spring or autumn.