Caminito

Caminito is a hundred-metre pedestrian lane in the port neighbourhood of La Boca in Buenos Aires, lined with corrugated iron facades painted in bold blues, reds and yellows. The painter Benito Quinquela Martin turned a disused railway right-of-way into this open-air museum in 1959, naming it after the 1926 tango by Juan de Dios Filiberto. The vivid colours go back to the Genoese immigrants who painted their wooden shacks with leftover ship paint from the nearby docks. Today tango couples posing for a few pesos, caricaturists and counters serving choripan crowd the narrow stretch. Cardboard figures of Diego Maradona, Eva Peron and Carlos Gardel wave from the balconies above.