The Capital Of Cool

The cobblestone streets of Buenos Aires's historic San Telmo district don't sing only with the seductive sounds of tango music anymore. A local band called Los Alamos plays country-roots rock in rowdy beer bars, featuring the mandolin-picking and harmonica-ripping riffs of former New Jersey high-school teacher Jonah Schwartz. "Nobody here even knows what a mandolin is!" marvels Schwartz, 26.

An invasion of foreign artists is transforming Buenos Aires into an emerging international capital of cultural cool. Like Prague in the 1990s, Buenos Aires offers chic on the cheap and is attracting scores of musicians, filmmakers, journalists, designers and even sitcom writers from abroad. Hundreds, if not thousands, have spilled in from the United States, England, Spain and beyond, helping to bring the capital out of a period of deep cultural isolation after an economic collapse five years ago. Champagne-fueled fashion shows and gallery openings keep the city's glitterati on a 24/7 social schedule. Casting agents scour bars looking for young English or Mandarin speakers for the dozens of foreign commercials regularly being shot in the city. A-list actors like Colin Farrell, Natalie Portman and Benicio del Toro have all vacationed in town recently.

It's been a long time coming. At the start of the 20th century, export-rich Argentina was one of the world's wealthiest countries. Porteños, as the B.A. locals are known, modeled their capital after the great cities of Europe, from where so many of them had come. They built ornate palaces, museums and theaters to host the orchestras, ballet companies and literary societies that had formed, earning Buenos Aires the lofty title "the Paris of Latin America." Even so, remote Argentina was never as culturally central as Paris in the 1920s, when the City of Light was home to such literary figures as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

Today, while Buenos Aires has yet to produce an expat artist of world renown, the feel of a happening city is there. American Marina Palmer, who lives in B.A. with her husband, published a memoir in 2005 about her experiences as a foreigner on the tango circuit. "Kiss and Tango" has been snapped up by Hollywood and is awaiting its big-screen adaptation. Music producer Tom Rixton worked with some of the biggest names in British music before moving to Buenos Aires with his Argentine wife to open a boutique hotel and mix music. He now produces tracks for Turf, one of the country's hottest rock bands, which has opened for the Rolling Stones and Oasis. New York designer Amanda Knauer moved to B.A., where she founded QARA, a designer line of high-quality Argentine leather bags and purses. Californian David Lampson used the $50,000 he won on a Bravo TV reality show for aspiring comedy writers to buy an apartment in B.A., where he's hard at work on several sitcom pilots for U.S. television networks. "I imagine the things I am doing now in Buenos Aires will resurface in my writing in the future," he says.

Argentina's turnaround began only after it hit bottom in 2002, when years of financial stagnation culminated in the collapse of the Argentine peso. Suddenly, it became three times more expensive for Argentines to fly to Paris, Milan or New York, and nobody had the money to buy a painting or see a show. Many local artists were forced to flee to Europe, draining life out of the local art scene. The sour mood was underscored by a sense of bitterness toward foreigners, whom many Argentines blamed for the crash.

The crash had a flip side, though. Overnight, Argentina became one of the world's most affordable travel destinations, breaking its isolation. In 2006, more than 4 million tourists visited the country to sip Malbec wine in the Andes, see penguins in Patagonia and dance the night away in Buenos Aires. That compares with 2.9 million visitors in pre-crisis 2000. Today the antiforeign tension of the crisis years has largely faded, as Argentina's economy sails into a fourth straight year of 8 percent-plus growth.