Breakfast was served buffet style on the 10th floor of the El Conquistador Hotel. There were surprisingly few tables but we managed to find a free one and quickly claimed it by leaving our freshly poured coffee on it. We went back to the huge table to see what all was on offer – juices, fresh fruit, cereal, eggs, bacon, bread rolls, croissants and about 20 different kinds of cakes and pastries. Maria was a bit more restrained, but David did his best to try everything and felt very full by the time we’d finished.

We had decided to go on one of Buenos Aires’ walking tours this morning and we knew we would pass a laundry on the way to the meeting point. Our huge bag of ‘winter’ clothes was dropped off and unsurprisingly we were told that it would be 2 loads and not just one. The meeting point for Free Walks Buenos Aires was supposed to be at 10:30am next to Teatro Colón, but this was a bit harder to find. Getting to the Theatre was easy, but determining the meeting point wasn’t. In the past, the guide would be wearing a distinctive coloured t-shirt and could be spotted from miles away – we walked round the block a few times but still couldn’t see a ‘guide’ looking person or any assembling crowd. With only a few minutes before the start time, David spotted a couple of equally bewildered tourists looking for the meeting point. At that point, a guy materialised with a guitar slung over his back and he introduced himself as the guide – guides are normally there 30 minutes beforehand to gather up the tourists. We thought it might just be the four of us, but another 30 odd people gravitated towards us from all sides. Obviously everyone had the same problem and was just waiting and watching from periphery.

Franco introduced himself again to the assembled crowd and asked everyone to tell their name and country before he started the tour with a song. We were taking the Recoleta Tour; Recoleta is a downtown residential neighbourhood and is an area of great historical and architectural interest, mostly because of the Recoleta Cemetery. It is also one of the most affluent neighbourhoods and it has one of the priciest real estate in the city.

Teatro Colón is the main opera house in Buenos Aires and it is ranked the third best opera house in the world by National Geographic. Acoustically it is considered to be amongst the five best concert venues in the world and this is concurred by Pavarotti. We moved across the plaza to view the different architectural styles of the surrounding buildings. At the time of construction, there was an admiration for France and in particular Paris so a very similar style was used.

On the corner of the plaza, there was a huge synagogue. Buenos Aires has 3rd biggest Jewish community in the world. Across the road was Teatro Cervantes, which was ravaged by fire and then restored to its original glory. Only one side has been painted though and the scaffolding has been around it for a very long time.

Continuing down the road, we came to the French Embassy which is one of only two buildings that remained following demolitions of buildings on 9 de Julio to make the road wider. We were amazed when we crossed the road yesterday, it must be about 20 lanes wide.

The San Martin building, which is now a government building for foreign affairs, originally belonged to a rich, religious lady. It sits on San Martin Plaza, which has his statue because he is considered a hero for his role in not only Argentina’s independence from Spain but many other South American countries too.

Walking through the park we all noticed a fenced off area full of dogs. Dog walkers, who sometimes collect many dogs from their working owners, take the dogs there for a run around. There are rumours that some people would leave dogs there while working, but this is generally denied. Bizarrely, there was a similarly fenced off area for a children’s playground, but it was smaller than the dog’s one. It seems the locals love their dogs more than their children.

Leaving the park, we walked through a small alley, past a high white building, to get to a church which was built by the religious rich lady who owned the San Martin Palace. The high building was built to deliberately block the view of the church from the palace. The story goes that the rich lady didn't approve of her son’s girlfriend, because she was not devoted/aristocrat enough to marry into the family. The son's girlfriend did come from a wealthy family though and built the high white building as revenge so the rich lady could not see her church from her palace.

After a quick look around the church, we had a break at coffee shop before walking down to the Falkland War Memorial. Looking down the hill from the memorial there was a large tower which was a gift from the Great Britain on Argentina's independence day from Spain – since the Falkland war it has been known as the Ex-British Tower.

Franco, our guide, gave us a bit of history, which helped us to understand why the war came about and led to the death of over 600 Argentinean soldiers. There was military dictatorship controlling Argentina from the 70’s and events were needed to restore national pride and to take people’s minds off the lack of freedom, the people who went missing and those who were simply tortured and killed. The hosting and the winning of the football world cup in 1982 was long forgotten so the military decided to retake the Falkland Islands (the Argentineans still believed that ‘Islas Malvinas’ were theirs). They sent very young soldiers, many of them under 20, with no experience to the Falklands and because no one was expecting it, they easily claimed the islands and raised the Argentinean flag. The news of the victory had the nation in euphoria.

In the UK though, Margaret Thatcher was facing her own domestic problems and declared war, sending in the best of the British troops. As world history knows (although the Argentineans seem to omit from theirs) everything went downhill for Argentina within a couple of months and the Falklands were back in British hands. If anything good came out of it, the military dictatorship decided to step down and allow for a democratic election.

We left the memorial and walked through the streets of some very expensive real estate before coming to a small site on a street corner. It was too small to be a plaza, but it had a few benches and rows of trees for shade. It was in fact a memorial to the 30 people who died on the site where embassy of Israel once was before it was bombed in a terrorist attack.

Franco then gave us a quick guide to Argentinean Spanish which has quite different pronunciation to Spanish spoken elsewhere. ‘Y’s have a much harder ‘cho’ sound while words with double ‘L’ sound more like a French ‘J’.

We crossed the wide 9 de Julio Avenue past the French Embassy to Plaza Catalonia where we were shown the painted on windows on the gable end of a building. It was cleverly done and no doubt no one would have noticed they weren’t real unless we were forced to look for something unusual in the plaza.

Continuing up Avenue Alvear we were told about some of the owners of the fancy houses. In general, Recoleta is a very rich neighbourhood and one of the houses even belongs to the Vatican. The house next door is owned by a Scottish family and they still live in it.

The end of the Alvear took us to Plaza Frances where a huge Gomero tree grew. It’s a sort of gum tree and this one was the biggest and oldest in the city. The branches of the tree grow low and very long with some of them needing to have supports put in to stop the limbs breaking. One of the boughs is supported by a statue carrying the tree on it’s shoulder.

Next to the plaza is Recoleta Cemetery for Buenos Aires’ rich people, Presidents and the famous. Normal people are buried elsewhere. There were some fancy mausoleums and some less grandiose, but which contained, perhaps, more important people. One such grave was for Eva Duarte who is buried in her family grave – she is much better known to the world as ‘Evita’.

Back outside the graveyard, Franco gave us another song on his guitar to bid us farewell. We tipped him 100 pesos, which was between $8 and $12 depending on the exchange rate, but equivalent to about 6 litres of beer in Argentina so not too bad for a morning’s work.

We took a walk over to Plaza Naciones Unidas to see the Flower Statue, but it was being repaired. It is an enormous metal structure resembling a flower and it looked like, if it was working, to have opening and closing petals.

The heat and the walk had made us a bit weary so we decided to just go back to the hotel. The walk back did take us past Patio Bullrich, a very expensive mall; we didn’t buy anything, just enjoyed their air conditioning.

Our hotel had given us vouchers for a Welcome Drink at the lobby bar, so we had a glass of red wine while we did some more research about what we could do in Buenos Aires.

Our research pointed us to the Indian restaurant Delhi Mahal for dinner. It wasn’t far away, just over the big road (which took us 3 sets of Green Men to get the full way across). The food was flavoursome, but definitely not spicy even though we had asked for Indian hot.