Buenos Aires, Argentina

Buenos Aires runs nonstop from Miami, Atlanta, and New York at around nine and a half to ten and a half hours, one of the more accessible South American capitals from the US. The colorful houses and tango dancers of La Boca's Caminito make an easy first afternoon, while Recoleta's cemetery — genuinely one of the city's most visited sites — and Palermo's parks and restaurants round out a few days.

A parrilla steakhouse dinner, with the asado grill visible from the table, is the meal most first-time visitors plan a night around; like much of South America and Spain, dinner reservations run late, often 9pm or after.

Argentina's seasons run opposite the US, so December through February is Buenos Aires' summer — hot, and a popular jumping-off point for a beach extension across the river to Uruguay's coast. September through November and March through May bring milder weather that suits walking the city itself better than peak summer does.

Buenos Aires' European-influenced architecture and café culture have earned it comparisons to Paris, but the city's identity is distinctly its own — tango's home neighborhood of San Telmo, the colorful Caminito street in La Boca, and a steakhouse culture built around Argentina's cattle country. Recoleta Cemetery, where Eva Perón is buried, functions almost as an open-air museum of elaborate mausoleums and is a common half-day stop.

Four nights covers the main neighborhoods and at least one tango show. It suits travelers interested in architecture, food and nightlife, and Buenos Aires' position as a major South American gateway makes it a common start or end point for longer regional trips.

Getting there: About 9.5 to 10.5h nonstop from Miami, Atlanta, and New York. We compare that routing against the alternatives before booking, and help plan the trip's dates around September to November, or March to May.

Buenos Aires earned its nickname 'the Paris of South America' honestly: a wave of late-19th and early-20th-century wealth from beef and grain exports funded European-trained architects to build the wide boulevards, Beaux-Arts facades and grand opera houses (the Teatro Colón, regarded as one of the best acoustically in the world) that still define the city center today. Tango originated in Buenos Aires's working-class immigrant dockside neighborhoods in the late 1800s, a fusion of African, European and local rhythms that was considered disreputable in polite society for decades before Paris embraced it and sent it back home respectable — milongas, informal social tango dances, still happen most nights across the city and are open to watch or, with nerve, join. Argentine beef culture runs deep enough to be near-religious: the asado, a slow wood-or-charcoal grilled barbecue, is a weekly family ritual more than a restaurant dish, and Argentina's per-capita beef consumption remains among the highest in the world despite recent declines. The city's café culture, centered on historic bares notables like Café Tortoni (open since 1858), and its fierce, specific devotion to mate, a caffeinated herbal drink shared from a communal gourd, are both genuine daily-life institutions rather than tourist performances.