There can be no manner of doubt that the gambling element in racing is far too popular in Buenos Aires. There is a race meeting on every day in the week, Sundays, of course, included, during a season which lasts nearly all the year round. And these meetings are thronged by youths and other people who most certainly should be, and would much better be, at work.
Whatever may be thought of the system of weekly National Lotteries (these are at least carried on with unimpeachable fairness and 10% of the amounts subscribed to them, in payment for tickets, goes, after paying working expenses, printing, etc., to charity) the totalizer appeals far too sympathetically to the Latin-American natural love of gambling; and that love, as always in a new country where so many fortunes seem to have had their origin in luck, has developed dangerously on the right bank of the River Plate.
Close also to Palermo Park is the scene of the annual Agricultural and Live Stock Show; now a world-renowned Exhibition of as fine cattle and sheep as can be seen anywhere. Horses and Poultry also are splendidly represented at this show; which is perhaps the greatest event in the Argentine Calendar.
Further out from the city, past and beyond Palermo, is Hurlingham; an ever-enlarging group of English red-brick villas inhabited for the most part by English people. These villas surround the ample grounds of the Hurlingham Club, where polo and riding and driving competitions, etc., follow the lines of its English prototype. The Club house is comfortable, the food good, and a huge swimming bath is among its many undoubted attractions. It also has a drag hunt.
Further out again are beautiful reaches of the Tigre River, famous for boating; and on which an annual regatta, the Henley of South America, is held.
The Avenida de Alvear, above referred to, runs through the most fashionable residential quarter of Buenos Aires, a quarter filled with veritable huge palaces which with their gardens surround the Recoleta, the fashionable cemetery. A strange city of the dead in which the coffins are seen on shelves contained in small plate-glass fronted temples, so that all may view the last outward casings of generations.
On “The Day of the Dead” (All Saints’ Day) the Recoleta is a blaze of beautiful wreaths and floral tributes; afterwards too often replaced, alas, by ugly contrivances in porcelain or, worse still, enamelled iron.
Returning to Buenos Aires proper one must not, cannot, forget Calle Florida, “The Bond Street of the South.” So called because in it are situate most of the finest shops in South America for the sale of what are sometimes officially described as articles of luxury; wearing apparel of the best and costliest, for both sexes, jewellery, stationery, etc. It is, in fact, to Buenos Aires all Bond Street once was, and old Bond Street to some extent still is, to London.