AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Caminito is Buenos Aires' most famously colourful lane: a 150-metre pedestrian street museum in the portside barrio of La Boca, where corrugated-tin tenement houses are painted in bold, mismatched hues and sculptures by Argentine artists line the cobblestones. Part open-air gallery, part living monument to the city's immigrant roots, it has become one of the most photographed places in the world.
The lane traces an old stream bed that once fed the Riachuelo and later carried a railway branch to Ensenada. When the rails were abandoned, the corner fell into disrepair until the painter Benito Quinquela Martín—a local boy who owed everything to La Boca—helped neighbours turn it into a museum in 1959, naming it after the beloved tango "Caminito." Today that gamble has paid off: it's a signature stop on almost every visit to the capital.
From dried-up stream to open-air museum
To understand Caminito you have to look down as well as around. Its sinuous, off-straight layout follows the course of a small stream that flowed through here until the early 20th century; locals called the area "Puntin," Genoese dialect for "little bridge." After the watercourse dried up, the strip became part of the railway line to Ensenada, and when that branch was closed in 1928 the route was left as a deserted alley.
Its second life began in 1959. A group of neighbours, joined by artists donating works, reclaimed the abandoned corner as a pedestrian "open-air museum," and it was the painter Benito Quinquela Martín—born and raised in La Boca and one of its greatest benefactors—who drove the project and proposed naming it after the tango "Caminito," composed by Juan de Dios Filiberto with lyrics by Gabino Coria Peñaloza. The street was inaugurated as a museum on 18 October 1959, with speeches celebrating it as the spiritual essence of La Boca.
