El Ateneo Grand Splendid

On Avenida Santa Fe, between Callao and Riobamba, there’s a bookstore where people walk in, take three steps and stop to stare at the ceiling. This is El Ateneo Grand Splendid: a 1919 theater that in 2000 swapped its seats for shelves and kept almost everything else. The painted dome, the boxes, the railings and the red stage curtain are all still in place.

A theater for Recoleta

This site was once home to the Teatro Nacional Norte. In its place, the impresario Max Glücksmann opened the Grand Splendid, designed by the architects Rafael Peró and Manuel Torres Armengol. The theater opened in May 1919, with its stalls ringed by four tiers of boxes.

The city was growing with immigration and filling its theaters, and the Splendid staged a bit of everything: opera, ballet and plenty of tango. Its stage saw the legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel, Ignacio Corsini and Roberto Firpo, who dedicated a tango to the theater and named it after it: “Grand Splendid.”

Radio, records and film

Glücksmann didn’t just own theaters. He also owned a record label, Nacional Odeón, which had its headquarters in the building. And around 1923 Radio Splendid began broadcasting from here, in the early years of radio in Argentina.

In the 1920s the theater started showing films. In 1929 it hosted the premiere of La divina dama (The Divine Lady), a Hollywood drama starring Corinne Griffith, remembered as the first sound film shown in the country. Theater and cinema coexisted for decades, and the last film screenings were in the late 1990s, shortly before the books arrived.

A dome painted to celebrate peace

Stand in the middle of the ground floor and look up. The dome, about twenty meters across, was painted by the Italian artist Nazareno Orlandi in late 1919, the year the peace that ended World War I was signed. It’s an allegory of peace: a celebration painted on the ceiling of a theater, in a city full of European immigrants.

Orlandi had been working in Buenos Aires since the late 19th century and had already painted other ceilings in the city, such as the one in the Salón Dorado, the golden hall of the old La Prensa newspaper, on Avenida de Mayo. The Splendid’s caryatids, the female figures that serve as columns, are by the sculptor Troiano Troiani.

From cinema to bookstore

When the cinema closed, the building was leased by Grupo Ilhsa, owner of the El Ateneo bookstores, and the architect Fernando Manzone led the renovation. The seats came out, the stalls were filled with shelves and the rest was kept: the dome, the boxes, the carvings, the railings and the curtain. The bookstore opened on December 4, 2000, and in 2025 it turned twenty-five.

The boxes became nooks where you can sit and leaf through a book. And on the stage, still framed by the red curtain, there’s a café: you sit where the actors used to stand.

What to look for

A walk from the bottom up.

Planning your visit

• Allow half an hour, or quite a bit longer if you start browsing.
• It’s a working bookstore: you can walk in and look around without buying anything.
• Early mornings and weekdays tend to be less crowded than afternoons and weekends.
• Opening hours change, so check them on the City’s tourism website.
• It gets very crowded inside and on the Santa Fe sidewalk: keep your phone and wallet close, as you would anywhere busy.
• The Palacio de Aguas Corrientes is about four blocks away, and Recoleta Cemetery about ten.

Last checked October 2026.