Buenos Aires Misteriosa

A new kind of excursion has been born in Buenos Aires: telling crime stories and mysterious legends  to the visitor. Buenos Aires city doesn’t have the characteristic of beautiful sceneries: there aren’t lakes, mountains or seaside, but it is a place where million of stories and legends took place, some of them true… but others we’re not too sure. Considering this, a new kind of tourism has been born – far from the traditional centers of attraction – that tells the visitor, even the “porteños”,  the hidden mysteries of this metropolis.

People have started to look for this activity more often, because they believed that they knew Buenos Aires, but they realized that it wasn’t completely true. Some foreigners do it, but most of the visitors are from Argentina, from the provinces (people who’ve already been to the city and don’t need to visit the Obelisco!).

Visiting the cemeteries is an option that this new trend offers. They show, for example, the place that a mother created to sleep beside her daughter’s grave, or the room that they built to a bride who died on her honeymoon. All stories full of morbidity, craziness and death that manage to frighten everyone, even the most skeptical tourist.

"Buenos Aires Misteriosa" ("Mysterious Buenos Aires") is an excursion that consists on a night circuit by bus, with narrations of crimes and urban fables. The best of it is that you can perfectly imagine the scene, because during the trip they show you the house, for example, where “Yiya Murano”  (a well known story in Buenos Aires of a woman who poisoned people)  poisoned one of her friends; or the wasteland where the legendary “Petiso Orejudo” (“Short and big-eared”) killed one of his victims. The darkness of the bus, the horror music and the excellent voice of a announcer  help to reach the proper climate. 

The selection of the stories was a hard job of investigation from books, newspapers, magazines and  proposals of the people about the mysterious Buenos Aires. The circuit lasts about two hour to fit in the stories of murders and legends that happened each specific area including the San Cristóbal, Barracas, Parque Patricios and San Telmo neighborhoods. This conditioned a lot, because they need to tell stories of murders and legends that happened each specific area. As it is difficult to do both the south and the north of the city on a single trip, they will launch Mystery Buenos Aires II soon, visiting other porteños neighborhoods.

Written & contributed by Hernando Gómez Salinas