But that is no longer Buenos Aires. Or rather, it is no longer the only Buenos Aires.

"We're about so much more than the tango," Agustina Menendez tells me. Menendez is a twenty-five-year-old singer and modern dancer. Recently, she began a small company offering visitors what she calls "alternative urban tours"—studio visits, gallery drop-ins, a trip to a metalworks that transforms into a performance space at night. "I've always hated the regular tourism thing," she says. "The tango shows, La Boca, Recoleta, and those places that have nothing to do with me"—the areas, she means, which tourists used to frequent before Buenos Aires began, suddenly and necessarily, to transform itself from a city run on nostalgia into a capital of design and style.

This is Buenos Aires today. The city that used to promote itself as the Paris of South America, with its wide boulevards, café culture, and opera house to rival the Palais Garnier, has at last shed its stubborn European envy and become—first grimly and then exuberantly—a wholly different and distinct place, going from derivative to innovative almost overnight. But it took a tragedy—Argentina's devastating 2001 economic meltdown, one of the biggest financial collapses anywhere, ever—to shake this city of three million (fifteen million if you count the entire metropolitan area) out of its creative deep sleep and into its current fizzy era of entrepreneurship and invention. The Porteños (as Buenos Aires residents call themselves) I met on my most recent trip—leading designers, artists, gallery owners, chefs, and hoteliers—have unleashed an unprecedented amount of energy into their city, making for what must be the most colorful financial recovery in history, not to mention one of the world's most profound, and thrilling, makeovers.

Such energy is, it seems, contagious. For who isn't talking about Buenos Aires these days—its food, its galleries, its bars and boutiques? And there are other reasons too: Despite the city's size (it is divided into forty-eight barrios, and you can spend forty minutes in a cab just getting across town) and distance from the United States (an eleven-hour flight from the East Coast, but with a time difference of only an hour or two), it is both accessible and, still, affordable. There is also the irresistible feeling as you walk through here that you are witnessing that rarest of occasions—the very moment of transition, a city in its adolescence, transforming itself from what it was into something different and new, redrawing its boundaries and rethinking its identity, the public face it presents to the rest of the world.

Even the heart of the city has shifted. Palermo Viejo, a large neighborhood of mostly one- and two-story buildings from the early twentieth century, has overtaken the Microcentro as the cultural core. For years it was mixed-use and modest—a storehouse squatting next to a town house, which sat next to a bodega, which stood beside a vacant lot. In the late 1990s, just before the collapse, the variety and breadth of space here began attracting the usual urban colonizers: artists and gay people, gallery owners and restaurateurs. Fashion houses and bars, hotels and boutiques followed, cropping up faster than anyone could write them down. Here, though, the Argentinean restaurant of one's dreams—the one with the gleaming red banquettes, the unfussy grilled meats and fish, and the waitress who looks like Gabriella Sabatini, only hotter—is just as likely to be next to an auto body shop as it is to a handbag boutique.