Retiro Station Layover: Buenos Aires Above It

Retiro, the three-railway terminus and national coach terminal on the north edge of central Buenos Aires, sits at the bottom of a slope with everything worth seeing at the top of it: an English clock tower, the wide lawns of Plaza San Martín, and the stepped 1936 Kavanagh Building above them.

Retiro Mitre’s stone front and its iron platform roof

The terminus on Avenida Ramos Mejía opened on 1 August 1915, designed by Louis Faure-Dujarric and Robert Prentice for one of the British-owned railway companies that built out the Argentine network: a stone front the length of a city block, a green dome over the centre, and a platform roof that counted among the largest iron structures anywhere when it went up. It has been a national historic monument since 2006.

What confuses people is that Retiro is not one station. The Mitre, Belgrano and San Martín lines each have their own building along the same avenue, and the country’s main long-distance coach terminal sits immediately behind them, so the name covers four separate arrival halls rather than one concourse. Working out which building you are in takes a minute and saves ten.

The Torre Monumental’s five bronze bells

Across Avenida del Libertador from the station, an eight-floor red-brick clock tower stands alone on its own plaza, put up in white Portland stone and English brick to a design by Sir Ambrose Macdonald Poynter and handed over on 24 May 1916 as a gift from the British residents of Buenos Aires. Clock and bells were both copied from the ones at Westminster, so the quarter-hours ring out over Retiro on a carillon of five bronze bells, the largest of them around seven tonnes.

For its first 66 years it was the Torre de los Ingleses and the plaza around it was Plaza Británica. Both names went in 1982, in the anti-British feeling that followed the Falklands war, and the Malvinas war memorial now stands on the slope opposite. A mid-1990s restoration put a glass lift up to the sixth floor, but access to the observation level has come and gone since, and the posted hours differ between sources, so treat the climb as a bonus and the tower as a free landmark.

Plaza San Martín, on the city’s old riverbank terrace

The park above the station covers a barranca, the old riverbank terrace that the city’s north edge is built on, which is why the walk up from the platforms is a genuine climb rather than a stroll. At the top, the equestrian monument to José de San Martín faces down Avenida Santa Fe, mature shade trees cover most of the lawn, and the whole thing costs nothing at any hour.

The building to look at from here is the Kavanagh, finished in 1936 on the plaza’s southern corner: 120 metres of stepped white concrete with no ornament on it at all, the tallest building in Latin America and the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the world when it opened. Florida street starts at the plaza’s far corner and runs a kilometre south as pedestrianised shopfronts. That climb up from the platforms is also the reason to drop your bag at a storage point near the station before starting rather than after.

The airport minibus leaves from Pellegrini 971, not from Retiro

Terminal Pellegrini sits a ten-minute walk from Plaza San Martín, down Florida and along Avenida 9 de Julio, and the express minibus out to Ministro Pistarini International Airport (EZE) runs from there roughly hourly, taking about an hour. Nothing on the rail network reaches the airport at all, so the alternative is a taxi or remis, 45 to 60 minutes with clear roads and longer without them.

If your flight leaves from Aeroparque instead, the calculation changes completely: it is a short ride north along the river. Either way, three hours around Retiro is enough for the tower, the plaza and Florida street, and anything longer is better spent carrying on into the historic centre covered in the main Buenos Aires guide, which begins where Florida ends.