La Boca
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.