Palermo, Including Parks

It was getting close to 4:00 p.m. by the time I finished the food tour this afternoon. So, this post, which covers what I did after that, may tie the one from my first post from today for brevity. I walked around Palermo a bit, including some of its parks.

You can probably guess, because I mentioned it in the last couple of posts and because I’m in Argentina, that when I say “Palermo,” I’m talking about the Palermo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, not the port city in Sicily called Palermo.

With that clarification out of the way, it’s now getting late, and I’m more than ready to go to sleep. So, let’s get this short post done, shall we?

Palermo Soho

While walking through the Palermo Soho district on the walking tour, close to our final destination, we saw, down one street, a small market area. It looked interesting, so I walked back there after the tour.

As I mentioned in the food tour post, the Soho area is the formerly poor, now hip district of the city. The market there was a small one, selling mostly crafts. It was surrounded by streets with lots of restaurants with tables out on the wide sidewalks. It was very colourful and lively.

There and everywhere I walked in the Palermo district was quite well treed and very pleasant.

Palermo Parks

Palermo has a string of three large parks, each across a street from the other. Or maybe they are subsections of one giant park. I’m not sure.

One of those parks is the one I visited this morning, Jardin Botánico Carlos Thays. When I walked from the Palermo Soho district this afternoon, I followed a route that didn’t take me to the botanical garden, but rather directly to the next one in the string, Ecoparque.

I’ve seen it described as a former zoo. That’s inaccurate. It’s still a zoo, but a small and casual one. Although it also has some water features and some lovely green areas that are not occupied by non-human animals.

Some peacocks were strutting around among the people. There’s a water feature, including a moat that surrounds an island. Water is a good thing to have surrounding an island because it otherwise stops being an island. From the other side of the moat from the island, I spotted a monkey roaming around the island. There didn’t seem to be any barriers other than the moat keeping the monkeys (I assume there were more than one, but I saw only the one) on the island.

The park also has some enclosures with small, cute animals that I couldn’t identify. One of the enclosures was surrounded by a low fence with widely spaced bars. It didn’t look like the animals would have any difficulty leaving their area, but they appeared quite content to stay in their section.

The park also has some bison. The fence around their enclosure also looked insubstantial. However, the enclosure was sunken somewhat, with a concrete wall between the surface area of the rest of the park and the floor of the enclosure. Nevertheless, the base of the enclosure looked close enough to the normal ground level that I would have thought that a vigorous bison with a running start could have been able to leap up and over it.

The bison weren’t at all vigorous when I was there. They were sitting in their enclosure.

The park also has some giraffes and af few other animals I’ve forgotten. So, I say that it’s very much a current, not a former zoo.

Bosques de Palermo (Palermo Woods) (maybe) and Jardin Japonés (Japanese Garden)

My walking tour app highly recommended a park called Bosques de Palermo (Palermo Woods). I think it was the next one over from Ecoparque. But I’m not sure. My walking tour app dropped a pin for Bosques de Palermo in that park. Google Maps had trouble finding it at all in Buenos Aires. And Apple Maps dropped a pin for Bosques de Palermo coincident with the entrance to the Jardin Japonés.

The Jarin Japonés is a walled-off section of the same park where my walking tour dropped a pin for Bosques de Palermo. So I don’t know if the latter is the overall name for that park, if it’s the section of the park excluding the Japanese Garden, or maybe it’s the overarching name for the string of three parks. I have no Idea.

Whatever, the section apart from the Japanese Garden was a lovely, peaceful, treed area.

The Japanese Garden is beautiful with lots of flowers, topiary, some small Japanese structures, and an irregularly shaped pond with some islands in it. A Japanese-style wooden red pedestrian bridge crosses onto the larger of the islands from both sides of the pond.

The Japanese Garden also has a large, sculpted tree trunk. There are carved birds perched on the branches at the top of the trunk. Some fish are sculpted into the bottom of the trunk. I took a close-up of the fish for the benefit of, well, you know who you are.

It was all quite charming.

By the way, there is a fee to enter the Japanese Garden. The sign at the entrance was solely in Spanish. Each age group had two prices. Beside each price was a word that was very close to the English word resident. One price for each age group had a “no” in front of the word, and the other didn’t. So I figured that one, the much lower one, was the price for locals, and the other was for tourists.

When I went to the ticket booth, the ticket seller asked me something in Spanish. I don’t know what, but I assumed she asked me if I was local. I responded, with, in English, “I’m sorry…”

She stopped me before I said anything else, said something in Spanish, and charged me the non-resident price.

That is, I assume it was the non-resident price.

As I said, I don’t speak Spanish. For all I know, the sign wasn’t referring to residents at all. I should have looked it up with Google Translate rather than just assuming that, because it was close to “resident, that must be what it was. Maybe, instead, there was, say, a price for short people and a price for tall people. That doesn’t make any sense, but if that was it, then the short-person price is much higher than the tall-person price.

And so ends my first full day in Buenos Aires.