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Buenos Aires' finest museums happen to be concentrated in its northern residential barrios of Belgrano, Palermo, Recoleta and Retiro, which stretch for kilometres along wide avenues beyond Avenida Cordoba. These museums contain the country's principal collections of colonial art, Spanish art, folk art, decorative art, and plastic art since independence, while a couple are dedicated to two of Argentina's most original twentieth-century artists, Xul Solar and Rogelio Yrurtia. Like the rest of the city's barrios, all four have a distinctive character while being true to the city as a whole - broadly speaking a combination of extravagant elegance and an authentic lived-in feel pervades each of them. The two northern barrios nearest to the centre, Retiro and Recoleta , both have their chic streets, lined with boutiques, art galleries, and smart cafes where there seems to be a dress code even to order a quick beer; these desirable neighbourhoods are known collectively to residents as Barrio Norte . Part of this snobbery is due to the fact that parts of Retiro - especially the dockside fringes and the highly insalubrious bits near the city's biggest train station, also called Retiro - are just as down-at-heel as parts of the southern barrios, if not more so. Recoleta on the other hand is avoided on business cards almost out of superstition, as the name is associated primarily with the barrio's magnificent cemetery where, among other national celebrities, Evita is buried. Both barrios also share an extraordinary concentration of French-style palaces , tangible proof of the obsession of the city's elite at the beginning of the twentieth century with the idea that their fledgling capital city needed to resemble Paris for Argentina to become a world power. Many of these palaces can be visited and some of them house the area's opulent museum collections, but they are also sights in themselves; wandering about the barrios' streets scrutinizing their finer details offers an interesting counterpoint to roaming in San Telmo or La Boca. Palermo and Belgrano , farther north, are large districts composed by turn of high-rise apartment buildings, tree-lined boulevards, and little cobbled streets of villas and grandiose neocolonial houses. An inordinate number of Buenos Aires' best restaurants and many of its shopping meccas are located up here, so you're likely to be heading in this direction at least once during a stay. It's worth making a day of it to check out the beautiful parks and gardens , attend a game of polo or pato - Argentina's most idiosyncratic national sports - or to see another beguiling side of the city in, for example, Palermo Viejo's Plaza Julio Cortazar, a colourful square surrounded by lively cafes-cum-art-galleries.
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