Caminito

Caminito is a curving, cobbled lane almost a hundred and fifty meters long, lined with corrugated-metal houses painted in colors you won’t see anywhere else in Buenos Aires. It looks like a stage set, and there’s some truth to that: behind it lie a train that stopped running, a tango with two stories, and a local painter who set out to turn a vacant lot into an open-air museum.

A curve that came first

If you’re wondering why a street of houses would bend like this, the answer lies beneath the cobblestones. According to the city government, a stream once ran here and eventually dried up. A spur of the railroad to Ensenada also passed through, carrying freight down to the banks of the Riachuelo river.

Around the late 1920s the trains stopped coming, and the stretch was left as an abandoned alley that ended up as a vacant lot and a garbage dump. The neighbors and the local artists rescued it: they cleared the land, made it a place to walk, and the street museum officially opened on October 18, 1959. The Genoese, the immigrants who shaped La Boca’s identity, called this area Puntín: “little bridge” in their dialect.

The neighborhood painter

The driving force behind it all was Benito Quinquela Martín. He was left as a baby at the Casa de Niños Expósitos, the city’s foundling home, and at seven he was adopted by a couple who ran a coal shop in La Boca. His father, Manuel Chinchella, was Genoese, and Quinquela is the Spanish form of that surname. Benito left school in third grade to deliver coal, and as a young man he hauled sacks at the port.

He painted that port all his life, and he gave what he earned back to the neighborhood in land and buildings, among them a school, a museum, a milk dispensary for babies, and a children’s dental institute. It was he who proposed naming the lane after a tango, and he who imagined it as an open-air museum.

One tango, two paths

The music of "Caminito" is by Juan de Dios Filiberto, a La Boca musician who worked at the port as a young man, in the workshops of the Mihanovich shipping company, and who walked along this curve on his way to work. For the lyrics he turned to the poet Gabino Coria Peñaloza, whom Quinquela had introduced to him.

Coria Peñaloza didn’t write about La Boca. He dusted off a poem of his from 1903, dedicated to a trail in Olta, a small town in the province of La Rioja. So the tango the lane is named after is about a different path, in a far corner of the country. It premiered in 1926 and won a contest held by the city.

What to see

A short walk, starting at the river and heading inland.

Planning your visit

• Allow an hour for the lane and the Vuelta de Rocha, and another if you go into the Museo Quinquela or Proa.
• Go during the day and stick to the area set up for visitors: the lane, the blocks around it, and Avenida Pedro de Mendoza along the river, between the Vuelta de Rocha and Proa. As in any crowded place, keep your phone and wallet close.
• The museum’s hours change, so check them on the city’s tourism website. The lane has its own official page on the same site.
• Fundación Proa is right on the corner of the lane, and La Bombonera, Boca Juniors’ stadium, about six. A bit farther is the Usina del Arte.

Last checked October 2026.