La Boca Neighborhood - Buenos Aires, Argentina

This neighborhood is maybe the most tourist in Buenos Aires, but at the same time that it shows a face to who visits it, it has another that is the one of being inhabited by a lot of people of few revenues that sometimes lives under quite precarious residence conditions and characteristic of the environment, as the floods that lately, thanks to important infrastructure works, have been able to clean up. Their name is due to that is the mouth of the Riachuelo, place for the one that Pedro de Mendoza entered in the first foundation, and that it was used as port during a lot of time. Their activity was always linked to the port thing and the productive thing, being constituted starting from last century an important labor population of immigrants especially from Genova that spoke the xeneise dialect, word that is used now to define the inhabitants of this neighborhood. These workers brought with them the new ideas socialists and anarchists and they constituted to this neighborhood in one of the centers of the social fight, obtaining this jurisdiction the first socialist representative in the Congress, Alfredo Palacios.
 

The constructions are those of the typical houses with walls of foils, also present in other port areas as Berisso, in La Plata that give to the neighborhood an unique physiognomy in the city. The tourist artery of this neighborhood is the picturesque Caminito, street of hardly 100 meters next to the coastal road, in which stand out the countless colors of its constructions, with murals and reliefs. In this street they are a variety of artists that offer their productions and shows. Other prominent points of the area are the Foundación Proa, modern center of exhibitions, the Museum of fine arts of La Boca among whose main characters is Benito Quinquela Martí, painter that carried out an enormous work on the neighborhood, the Theater La Ribera, the market, with more than 100 years of antiquity, and the Bridge Nicolás Avellaneda, with the two structures, the old one in disuse and the later one, one beside the other one. The churches of the neighborhood are "San Juan El Evangelista" and the Sanctuary "Nuestra Señora Madre de los Emigrantes". There are some places of tango very exclusive and several Italian taverns, especially on the street Necochea. A characteristic element of the neighborhood is the Club Boca Junior, one of the most important of the country that possesses its stadium, The Bombonera (chocolate box), with capacity it for more than 50.000 spectators.