The tallest building in Buenos Aires is Alvear Tower at 235 metres with 54 floors, completed in 2017. It stands in Puerto Madero, the former docklands on the eastern edge of the city, and it is the tallest building in Argentina. Second place is a long way behind: Torre Cavia in Recoleta reaches 172.8 metres, a gap of over 60 metres between first and second that few cities can match.
Alvear Tower
The tower is a residential and hotel building developed by the Alvear group, whose Alvear Palace Hotel in Recoleta has been the city's grandest since 1932. It holds apartments in the upper section and the Alvear Icon Hotel below, along with restaurants and a rooftop pool.
The design is by MRA+A, the studio of the Argentine architect Mario Roberto Álvarez, who died in 2011 before it was completed and who was the dominant figure in twentieth-century Argentine modernism. It is a slim rectangular shaft with rounded corners and a full-height glass facade.
Its 235 metres are measured to the top of the structure. The building sits at the northern end of Puerto Madero, close to the ecological reserve, which gives its upper floors views over the Río de la Plata in one direction and the whole city in the other.
Puerto Madero, the Docks That Failed Twice
The four docks of Puerto Madero were built between 1887 and 1897 to a design by Eduardo Madero, and they were obsolete almost immediately. Ships grew faster than expected, the docks were too small, and a new port was built to the north within two decades.
The area then sat semi-derelict for most of the twentieth century — 170 hectares of warehouses and empty quays immediately beside the financial district. A regeneration corporation was formed in 1989, and the brick warehouses on the western side were converted to offices and restaurants through the 1990s.
The eastern side, built on reclaimed land, became the site for the towers. Alvear Tower, El Faro, Château Puerto Madero, Mulieris and the Renoir towers all date from after 2000, and the district now holds the highest property prices in Argentina.
Why the City Is So Flat
Buenos Aires proper has around three million people in 203 square kilometres, and almost all of them live in buildings of three to twelve storeys. The characteristic fabric is the mid-rise apartment block, built continuously along the street with no setback, and it covers most of the city.
That pattern came out of the 1944 building code and the propiedad horizontal law of 1948, which created the legal framework for apartment ownership and triggered a construction wave through the 1950s and 1960s. The rules set heights by street width and encouraged the block-filling form.
The 2018 urban code replaced the old zoning with a system based on street corridors and heights measured in metres, and it has been criticised for allowing taller buildings in low-rise neighbourhoods. Height in Buenos Aires remains a live political argument in a way it is not in most of the region.
Puerto Madero's Critics
The district is the most successful waterfront regeneration in Latin America by most measures, and it has been argued about since it started. Its towers hold some of the most expensive apartments in South America, and a substantial share of them are investment properties that sit empty for much of the year.
Studies of Puerto Madero have consistently found it among the least densely inhabited parts of the city despite having the most floor space per hectare, and the streets are quiet in a way the rest of Buenos Aires is not. The dock warehouses on the western side draw crowds; the eastern towers do not.
The district also sits immediately beside some of the city's poorest areas, including Villa 31 a few kilometres north. The contrast is the standard criticism, and it is why the regeneration corporation's model has not been repeated elsewhere in the city.
The Kavanagh Held the Record for Fifty-Nine Years
The Kavanagh Building, completed in 1936 at 120 metres and 31 floors, was the tallest building in Latin America when it opened and the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the world. It held the Buenos Aires record until 1995.
Its Art Deco stepped massing, designed by Sánchez, Lagos and de la Torre, was radical for the city, and it was built in fourteen months. It was declared a national historic monument in 1999 and named by the American Society of Civil Engineers as an international historic civil engineering landmark.
The building was commissioned by Corina Kavanagh, who according to a persistent local story financed it to block the view of the Basílica del Santísimo Sacramento from the Anchorena family palace after a rejected engagement. The story is repeated in every guidebook and has never been documented.
Between Kavanagh and Alvear
Buenos Aires added almost nothing tall for six decades. Argentina's economy through the second half of the twentieth century made long-horizon construction difficult: hyperinflation in 1989 and 1990 reached rates above 3,000% a year, and the 2001 default and currency collapse wiped out the mortgage market entirely.
Torre Le Parc in Palermo, completed in 1995 at 158 metres, finally passed the Kavanagh. Torre Cavia followed in 2009 and the Puerto Madero towers through the 2000s and 2010s.
Even now, tall buildings in Argentina are almost always financed without mortgages. Apartments are bought outright, frequently in US dollars, because peso lending at Argentine interest rates is impractical. That constrains what can be built and who can buy it.
Where the Rest of the Towers Are
Outside Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires' tall buildings cluster in Palermo and Belgrano along the northern corridor, and in the Catalinas Norte complex just north of the financial district, built from the 1970s on former railway land.
Catalinas holds the Torre BankBoston, the Torre Prourban and the Repsol-YPF tower by César Pelli, an Argentine architect better known internationally for the Petronas Towers. Pelli was born in Tucumán and trained in Argentina before emigrating.
The city's most-photographed modern building is not a tower at all. The Puente de la Mujer, Santiago Calatrava's rotating footbridge across Dock 3, completed in 2001, has become the emblem of Puerto Madero.
The Obelisco
The Obelisco on Avenida 9 de Julio, at 67.5 metres, is the symbol of Buenos Aires and was built in 31 days in 1936 to mark the fourth centenary of the city's founding.
It stands in the middle of what the city claims is the widest avenue in the world, at around 140 metres across including its side lanes. The claim is contested — several avenues elsewhere are wider by some measures — but 9 de Julio is uncontroversially enormous, having been created by demolishing an entire row of city blocks.
The Obelisco has been the site of every major public celebration in Argentina, including the crowds after the 1978, 1986 and 2022 World Cup wins, which are reliably the largest gatherings the country produces.
Argentina's Other Tall Buildings
Rosario has the Torre Aqualina at 130 metres and a cluster of riverfront towers. Córdoba's tallest is around 130 metres. Nothing outside Buenos Aires approaches 200 metres.
In the wider region, Buenos Aires ranks below Santiago, whose Gran Torre Santiago reaches 300 metres and is the tallest building in South America, and below São Paulo's newest towers and Balneário Camboriú's residential cluster in Brazil.
South America has one building above 250 metres. The continent's tall building stock is small relative to its urban population, which reflects the same financing and land-cost factors that apply in Buenos Aires.
Building on the River Plate Mud
Buenos Aires sits on the pampas at the mouth of the Río de la Plata, on deep alluvial and loess deposits with no rock near the surface. There is no bedrock to found on.
Tall buildings there rely on friction piles and on the pampeano formation, a stiff clayey silt that provides adequate bearing at depths of 20 to 30 metres. Puerto Madero's towers stand on reclaimed dock fill above that, which adds a layer of settlement risk.
Argentina is not seismically active in the Buenos Aires region — the earthquake risk is concentrated in the Andean west, around Mendoza and San Juan — so wind and settlement govern design rather than seismic loading.
Views
There is no public observation deck in any Buenos Aires skyscraper. The best accessible high view is from the Palacio Barolo on Avenida de Mayo, a 1923 building of 100 metres whose design is structured around Dante's Divine Comedy — 22 floors for the 22 cantos, hell in the basement, heaven in the lighthouse at the top, which is open to visitors.
Its architect Mario Palanti built a near-twin, the Palacio Salvo, in Montevideo across the river, and the two lighthouses were originally intended to signal to each other.
For the skyline itself, the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, the wetland reserve on reclaimed land east of Puerto Madero, looks back across the water at the whole tower cluster. For comparison across the region, see the tallest building in São Paulo and the count of countries in South America.
