They've got real team spirit in Buenos Aires

You don't have to be football crazy to live in this city, says Mark Rowe, but it helps

There isn't too much wrong with a city that paints its houses in the colours of the local football team. A walk through La Boca, a barrio, or neighbourhood, in the south of Buenos Aires took us past row upon row of gaily decorated houses. Many are blue and yellow, reflecting the strip of Boca Juniors, the most famous football team in Argentina and whose beloved son is Diego Maradona.

The choice of colours has a quirky origin: unable to choose what colours the team should wear, the founding fathers agreed that the national flag of the next boat to sail into the city's port would decide the matter: the ship came from Sweden.

Rather like an over-excited Changing Rooms team, the painters and decorators of La Boca appear to have been unable to contain themselves. Boca's gaudily painted football stadium is appropriately known as La Bombonera, or the chocolate box. Elsewhere, a tightly packed network of tin houses and alley-ways, pays homage to the louder of the primary colours. Façades are divided into quarters, daubed in green, brown, blue and yellow and fronted with wrought iron railings on balconies where grannies chat and watch the world pass by; others have blue shutters with yellow walls while still more boast green shutters with yellow frames posted on brown walls. Washing lines, full of socks, underwear and bed sheets remind you that this is a living quarter rather than a mere tourist attraction. A fierce sense of local pride hangs in the air.

Café society is ingrained in the history of both La Boca and Buenos Aires. La Boca's old shipyard carries the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who came to the New World. Most of the arrivals were men and they quickly forged friendships in the cafés, or confiterias, that sprang up to service them. There is a touch of the Bohemian to it all, a playful, raffish feel that comes across as a combination of New York, Naples and Barcelona. The façades of Boca's cafes and restaurants are painted in vivid gypsy caravan-style designs. Many display a plaque, or statue, to the city fire brigade, a sensible precaution when one looks at all the tinderbox buildings squeezed together down narrow alleyways. Street entertainers spray-painted in bronze make children yelp by tapping their shoulders and freezing instantly into poses of dandies from yesteryear.

The tradition of café society lives on across the city, most clearly in the cobbled streets of the Bohemian quarter of San Telmo, adjacent to La Boca. Here, bearded artistic types, scruffily dressed, shuffle around in slippers, sip coffee in family run cafés, and gaze at the passing world through open windows. Sunday is the day to visit, when a sprawling flea market takes over and telephones that could serve as props in Hitchcock movies stand next to meticulously preserved His Master's Voice gramophones.

Snatches of tango dances start up once the heat of the day has dissipated, as old men quick-step with their shadows in the gentle light of the late afternoon sun, proudly displaying their graduation certificates from tango schools of the 1950s. A little further away, in downtown, lies perhaps the most venerable of all confiterias, Café Tortoni. The economic chaos that has hit this fiercely patriotic nation – "harder than the 1929 slump" according to one waiter – seems to stop at the front door which opens to reveal a magnificent mahogany-panelled café with leather chairs, Art Nouveau glass ceilings and marble table-tops at which chat elegant women and moustachioed men.

The grace and style that characterises Buenos Aires survives even in death. Recoleta cemetery, to the north of the centre, is the final home of the rich and famous. Marble mausoleums stand side by side interspersed with monkey puzzle trees. Many are mini-crypts with steps leading down to tombs while statues of soldiers guard the burial sites of generals. Evita Peron lies here, too, buried 30 feet underground to prevent political opponents from exhuming her body. Fresh flowers are laid daily and her resting place is a pilgrimage centre for foreigners and Argentines alike, most of whom see her as a modern-day saint who helped the poor and cut through the snobbery of upper-class Buenos Aires.

Among the plaques is a tribute from the city's taxi drivers' union, in their distinctive black and yellow livery. One of her epitaphs does actually say words, which roughly translated, read: "Don't cry for me Argentina, I remain quite near to you." Say what you like about Andrew Lloyd Webber, at least he does his research.

The Facts

Getting there

Until the end of June, return flights from London to Buenos Aires cost from £676. A six-night holiday staying at the four-star Claridge Hotel starts from £935 per person, based on two sharing, with Journey Latin America (020-8747 8315; www.journeylatin america.com). The price includes return flights from Heathrow with British Airways, accommodation on a b&b basis and transfers.

Further information

Argentinean Embassy (020-7318 1300).