Caminito

Caminito is a short, crooked lane in La Boca, the old port quarter of Buenos Aires, where the Riachuelo bends at Vuelta de Rocha before meeting the Río de la Plata. It runs for little more than a hundred metres, and its curve gives it away: a stream once flowed here into the Riachuelo, and when it dried up the bed became a railway line. After the trains stopped, the strip was left as a rubbish-strewn gap between the backs of houses, until neighbours in the 1950s decided to reclaim it.

The man most associated with that rescue is the painter Benito Quinquela Martín (1890–1977), who grew up in La Boca and spent his career painting its docks, ships and workers. He pushed for the abandoned track to become an open-air museum, and the Calle Museo Caminito was formally opened in 1959. The name comes from a 1926 tango, "Caminito", with music by Juan de Dios Filiberto, a Boca man and Quinquela's friend, and lyrics by Gabino Coria Peñaloza. The street is therefore a tribute twice over: to the neighbourhood's painter and to its composer.

What makes the lane worth looking at closely is the architecture it frames. The houses are conventillos, the tenements in which Genoese and other immigrant families crowded together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, built of timber and corrugated sheet metal and raised on foundations against the floods that regularly swamped the low riverbank. Quinquela turned their façades into a canvas, and the patchwork of saturated blues, yellows, reds and greens, panel by panel, is what the whole world now pictures when it thinks of La Boca. Along the walls hang reliefs, murals and sculptures by Argentine artists, among them Luis Perlotti and Julio Vergottini, and tango dancers and painters work the lane and the small squares at either end.

Seen from the far end, Caminito opens onto the old harbour at Vuelta de Rocha, and the view back up the lane — bright tin walls, balconies and laundry against a grey port sky — is the reason to come. It is small enough to walk in a few minutes, but it rewards a slow pace: look up at the upper storeys, where the colour changes from sheet to sheet, and at the details of the artworks set into the walls.

Getting there

Caminito lies in the La Boca neighbourhood in the south of Buenos Aires, where Dr. Del Valle Iberlucea meets Magallanes street, just across the Riachuelo from Avellaneda (about 2.4 km). The nearest airport is Aeroparque Jorge Newbery (AEP), about 10 km away. La Boca is reached from the city centre by city bus or taxi; the lane itself is pedestrian.