How did the Welsh end up in Patagonia? To a certain extent, they fell victim to a dodgy marketing campaign. Feeling threatened by English dominance in the 1800s, they were looking for a place to relocate to in order to protect their language and culture. Originally, this was set to be Vancouver Island in Canada…
If you’ve ever been to an art gallery and thought “this is the life” as you chugged back a glass of bubbly while gazing at a curious new installation, you’ll be interested to know that the opening-to-end-all-gallery-openings is about to begin in Buenos Aires. From Friday 18 May until Tuesday 22 May, arteBA 2012 dusts down its canvases to begin the 21st edition of the art collectors’ fair that gets Buenos Aires, if not Argentina and Latin America, buzzing…
Hugging the border with Chile, Argentina’s dramatic Lake District makes a suitably bellowing welcome to Patagonia. Banish all notions of the rolling hills of Cumbria – this is big landscape, and visitors must dress, eat, travel and plan accordingly. San Carlos de Bariloche – known universally as Bariloche – is the main hub of this great expanse of mountain-rutted wilderness, so all visitors to this part of the world will invariably lay their woolly hats here at some point. It’s a sprawling…
When you hear about over two thousand people gathering on the streets of Buenos Aires, odds are it’s a rousing protest or pro-government rally. Yet when similar numbers took to the streets in Boedo last Saturday night, it wasn’t saucepan bashing or Peronist chants keeping them going. Instead, tango music played and Malbec bottles were drained, as the third edition of Boedo’s Vendimia harvest festival got under way…
Argentina is a vast country where the main attractions are on a huge scale. Beyond the infinite skies, shimmering glaciers and horizon-bending pampas, this is the cradle of the tango and a country where life is lived large, from the indulgences of succulent steak and celebrated wines to the infamous Buenos Aires nightlife. In this brief guide we’ll offer travel advice…
Although movie-making may not be the first word beginning with the letter M to be associated with Argentina (take Malbec, Maradona and Messi for starters), cinema is big business in terms of the number of foreign and Argentinian films produced here and festivals held around the country each year. It’s no fluke that the country has two Oscars to its name…
Ten years ago, even before I was such a beer snob, when a friend and I were planning parties, we would put “NB” on the invitations: No Brahma. OK, maybe I was a beer snob then, but the Brazilian beer, a whole 20 centavos cheaper than Quilmes, wasn’t just bland. It was offensively bland. Like Kenny G…
Fresh from a recent trip to Mendoza, Andrew Catchpole looks at the innovative Argentine art of microclimatic blending. An amusing and revealing tweet recently did the rounds from a satirical would-be-sommelier tweeter. Hashtagged #LessonsInService, the twittersphere was advised: “When writing wine descriptions on a menu: You can write “crisp, crispy or Malbec” on anything and it will sell.”…