The good, greedy news: today’s Buenos Aires is both astonishingly cheap and deliciously appetising. The rate of exchange makes it a better place to shop and eat than New York. Along the gleaming waterfront, it even seems newer. A parade of jazzy restaurants, chromium-bright offices and A-listers’ apartments have replaced the obsolete warehouses, whose bricks – originally made in Manchester – have been recycled to grace the russet facades.

At reputedly the best of the many restaurants, Cabaña Las Lilas, the starters alone are a meal, after which a shared portion of sirloin steak, grilled a la parilla, with a pyramid of sweet potato on the side, will sate two merely famished people. Call a few days ahead and speak a little Spanish, por favor – even if it’s not in the BA accent, which resembles that of Andalusia – and there’s a better chance of a terrace table on the quayside.

Not far away is Il Gran Caruso, also with a waterfront terrace, where the pasta reminds you that 8m Argentinians have roots in Italy. Curiously, unlike in the USA, there seems to be no local mafia. “Argentinians,” the old saying goes, “are Italians who speak Spanish, dress like the British and pretend to be French.” This roster omits more recent arrivals: Jews (a quarter of a million in BA), Basques, Japanese (the fish that previously fattened and flavoured the beef now rolls up as sushi), Poles and Germans, refugees of various vintages and motives.

Back in the 1960s, my friend the late Gordon Meyer, a writer whose Quits is a miniature masterpiece about sexual payback-time in old BA, maintained that the key difference between North and South America was that the Latins who colonised South America didn’t bring their women with them, but instead married the Indian natives. Hence the females in BA were more beautiful, more elegant (and enchantingly hairier) than those in the USA.

The wealth of the old Porteño families came from the herds on their distant estates on the pampas, the boundless plateau stretching north towards Brazil and Paraguay. The legendary gauchos are its cowboys. Do they still use bolas – lengths of rope with lead balls at each end – instead of lassos to cull young steers, as they did in the GA Henty adventure stories I read as a small boy in wartime Devon? The incarnation of machismo on horseback, as quick to draw his knife as any cowpoke his six-shooter, the gaucho’s mystique fascinated Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer, who was as blind as Homer and as farseeing. As cultural caudillo (boss), he instilled in his students a love of English literature. He called the sea “ la pampa de los Ingleses”, the English pampas, across which British admirals, engineers and bankers have made their civilising way.

When we went to have tea at Tortoni, in the Avenida de Mayo, Borges was at the next table. Tortoni is the equivalent of the Café les Deux Magots, in St Germain des Prés: you are promised the intellectual elite and you find only other tourists. Without windows, the deeply recessed interior, with its ceiling fans, is permanently lit by Tiffany-shaded lamps. Since Borges died in 1986, he could be our neighbour only in effigy.

He shared a table with two other emblematic figures: Alfonsina Storni, the local Sylvia Plath, a poetess who “hated men” and, mortally sick, walked into the sea at Mar del Plata in 1938; and Carlos Gardel, the iconic king of tangueros, who died, at the peak of his glossy fame, in a plane crash in 1935.

As with flamenco in southern Spain, people swear that the modern version of the tango is an effete travesty of the real thing. The dance originated in raw, Apache-style strut-and-glare improvisations in the Boca (the mouth), the old quayside area – now souvenir heaven – through which immigrants passed, or where they huddled in makeshift shelters of corrugated iron and chipboard, gaudily faced with whatever colour was left over from painting the ships in the harbour.

Boca Juniors, for whom Maradona played in his glory days, has its stadium nearby. After mid-morning coffee in the old, happily unrenovated Bar Plaza Dorrego, in the San Telmo district, we found a leggy, war-painted woman in a black felt hat, black high heels, black silk stockings and a tight, braided waistcoat already tangoing her scornfully seductive solo way along where the old customs house used to stand.

Whatever its low-life source, the tango was nationalised by the bourgeoisie in the 1920s, when my father was amateur tango champion of the world, even if his world was the English ballroom circuit. A friend said of him, “Cedric’s a Ruritanian prince when he waltzes and a dago when he does the tango.” In his day, it was as charmless to rehearse before a competition as before making love. My father and his partner relied on inspiration for the slinky twists and turns that the music provoked. In later years, he wore a bowler hat, carried a brolly and caught the 9.13 to the City.

The longest-running tango show is at the Esquina Carlos Gardel, a Tinsel Age theatre with off-white icing. We settled into a dress-circle booth and were served an excellent dinner before the show, which we watched from our table. The surly throb of the tango is in tune with the Porteño character. Mutual distrust is endemic. Life, public and domestic, is a competition of truths (mine) and falsehoods (yours). Psychiatrists thrive as nowhere else. The city itself seems to suffer from a complex: it may be a pulsating metropolis, but it has no heart, only arteries, such as the Calle Florida, once a chic walkway, now a raucous bazaar. On our first visit, almost 40 years ago, Harrods BA was the flagship of Argentina’s anglophilia. Where else would you find cricketers speaking Spanish, jolly fine polo players and cloned public schoolboys, complete with boaters and blazers?

When the Malvinas (Falklands) war broke out, Britannia’s icons were often vandalised. Harrods is now a dusty shell, awaiting evisceration. Even the avenue named for George Canning – the early 19th-century foreign secretary – has been retitled Avenida Scalabrini Ortiz to glorify some elongated local hero. Our taxi driver used the old name as he drove us to Palermo Viejo, where the sprawling Sunday market is a bargain-fest for shirts and dresses. At least the downsized replica of Big Ben, donated by the British, remains in its place of immovable honour on the Avenida 9 de Julio.

BUENOS AIRES is a great city which does not quite know what is great about it. It may sport a busy harbour, but it is more than 150 miles from salt water. The wide, wide Rio de la Plata – literally the Silver River – has been described as “a galloping brown wash of effluent”, most of it picked up by its gushing tributary, the Parana, on its 2,600-mile journey from the Brazilian hinterland. There is a great opera house but little art: the Museo de Bellas Artes gives pride of place to a third-rate Monet (but does have an excellent Klee). Its floor of Argentinian painters is a confession of painterly penury.

Argentina has profited and suffered from a series of historical tsunamis: distant events have come rolling across the Atlantic with seismic consequences. If the United States had not rebelled in 1776, the English might have had the cash and the guns to implant themselves more decisively in South America. And if, three decades later, Napoleon had not been enough of a megalomaniac to invade Spain, the Spanish empire might not have crumbled. The second world war turned Argentinian beef into gold on the hoof, creating expectations that dissipated and grievances that festered. And then again, in 1982, whatever her motives, Margaret Thatcher did more for the Argentines than they could for themselves: the British victory in the Malvinas discredited General Galtieri and his fellow Juntists, who were hounded from office after a decade of savage “secret warfare” against their own people.

Since then, a succession of democratically elected presidents have made “Least said, soonest mended” their cliché of choice. But if you go to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Casa Rosada, the pink house where the president lives, you see stencilled on the pavement the white, scarved heads of the madres, the brave mothers who dared what male Argentinians did not. During the black years of the 1970s, they marched round and round the Plaza de Mayo, holding up the portraits of los desaparecidos – the sons, brothers and husbands who “disappeared” under the regime.

Thousands of supposed “subversives” were rounded up, tortured and thrown from (navy) aeroplanes into the sea. Honour requires my telling you of a book entitled A Lexicon of Terror, by Marguerite Feitlowitz. Nobody has to read it, and nobody will enjoy it, but there it all is.

While we were in the Plaza de Mayo, on a clear, sunny day, it began to snow. The flakes, falling from adjacent rooftops, were leaflets protesting against President Kirchner’s amnesty for yesterday’s murderers and torturers, including a still smart gynaecologist who sold on the babies of women he brutalised.

No wonder there is still a cult of Eva Peron. Evita (little Eva) was a prototype of Princess Di. In a macho society, she had the nerve to champion the descamisados (literally, the shirtless ones). Unlike Diana, she came from a poor, provincial background to become first a radio actress and then Juan Peron’s charismatic consort. Glorying in celebrity, she never ceased to resent the arrogance of the rich and the complicity of the Church with the powerful. In 1951, she dared to be a candidate for vice president of Argentina. The renown of an uneducated, illegitimate exactress had eclipsed that of her husband, who aborted her candidature. Diagnosed with cancer, she died two years later.

Evita’s black-marble address in the Recoleta cemetery – a maze of streets in which the dead are housed in miniature mansions – is still flowered with pilgrims’ tributes. When Peron fell, Evita’s body was secretly shipped overseas and buried, for a time, in Milan, before the Peronists brought it, and its karma, back to BA. Now, Evita’s coffin is buried 25ft down, encased in concrete, to seal it from predators.

The Recoleta cemetery is in a smart quarter where the ubiquitous tangueros grace the Sunday craft market. It is the only place where I have ever seen a tomb with an ensconced crucifix and, in the same niche, a large menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum sacred to the Jews. Was the common grave the mark of tolerance? “Perhaps,” said our guide, Paola Piera. “But here in Buenos Aires money will always marry money.” La vida!

— Frederic Raphael was a guest of Cox & Kings

Travel brief

British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) is the only airline to fly direct from the UK to Argentina. Fares from Heathrow to Buenos Aires (with a touchdown in Sao Paulo) start at £800.

Cox & Kings (020 7873 5000, www.coxandkings.co.uk) can tailor-make itineraries throughout Argentina. Four nights at the Sofitel in Buenos Aires cost from £1,150pp, including B&B accommodation and flights. Alternatively, a 12-night Highlights of Argentina itinerary visits Buenos Aires, Iguaçu Falls, Ushuaia and the Perito Moreno Glacier, from £2,550pp, with flights. Or try Cazenove & Loyd (020 7384 2332, www.cazenoveandloyd.com) or Bailey Robinson (01488 689777, www.baileyrobinson.com).