NEIGHBORHOODS > RETIRO

Retiro

There are various versions on the origin of the neighborhood’s name, some of them dating back to 1536, the first founding of Buenos Aires. According to this theory, with the Adelantado Pedro de Mendoza came Sebastián Gómez, a man who, repenting for the murder he had committed, retired to a desolate encampment where he built an hermitage and spent the remainder of his life giving himself to God. A large cross dominated the site, and when Juan de Garay arrived fifty years later to found the city a second time, said cross was the only element still standing. Another version holds that the cross was placed by Garay’s expedition to mark the boundary of the ejido of the new city, dominating a desolate landscape. What is certain is that the cross appears on the map of the measurement of Buenos Aires made in 1608, with the name of Ermita de San Sebastián, coinciding with that of the alleged hermit of the Mendoza expedition.

Mostly a desolate area for the best part of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the neighborhood received an influx of settlers as the traditional patrician families of Buenos Aires abandoned the southern neighborhood of San Telmo in 1871, when the yellow fever epidemic stroke. Following the fashion of the time, magnificent examples of Beaux Arts architecture began to emerge, later followed by some of the most emblematic examples of Art Deco architecture worldwide.

The neighborhood also encompasses an office district bordering the area known as “The City” – the financial center of Buenos Aires – and another with a markedly residential profile with high-end buildings that is often considered part of the informal Barrio Norte. Retiro is as well a vital transportation hub, with three train stations and another subway station where several metropolitan railway lines converge, as well as numerous short and long-distance bus lines. In the vicinity of the transport hub there is an administrative area where several judicial offices operate. Plaza San Martín is one of its main green spaces and one of the most iconic parks in Buenos Aires, which Borges immortalized in his poem by the same name.

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