It is a traditional upper-class and conservative neighborhood with some of the priciest real estate in the city, known for Paris-style townhouses, lavish former palaces and posh boutiques.

Neighboring communities are Retiro to the southeast, San Nicolás, Balvanera and Almagro to the south, and Palermo to the northwest, and the River Plate to the northeast.

It formed a type of small delta, with channels along the current Austria and Tagle Streets, which flowed into the Río de la Plata.

When Buenos Aires suffered terrible cholera and yellow fever epidemics in the 1870s, the population of the city spread out to avoid the contagion.

Behind Carlos Thays Park is located the Centro Municipal de Exposiciones, which houses a wide variety of exhibitions and cultural events.

[citation needed] A construction in the brutalist style, located on Agüero Street between Libertador Avenue and Las Heras, is home to the new National Library of Argentina.

At this, and at other cabarets such as the Armenonville, a "peringundín" ("dance hall") where Carlos Gardel was known to appear, fights—occasionally bloody—would break out between "malevos" ("ruffians"), "compadritos" ("tough-guys") and "jailaifes" ("high-lifes” or high society boys) according to the florid contemporary slang (lunfardo).

In the 1910s, when the Palais de Glace no longer served as an ice skating rink, it became a dance venue, and it is there where the tango finally became accepted by the upper classes of Buenos Aires, especially since it had already become a fad in Paris.

The Recoleta Cemetery also possesses many exquisite works of art, obscured by their funerary location: the sculpture known as the Cristo Muerto by Giulio Monteverde, for example.

From the end of the nineteenth-century to the start of the 1920s, the Recoleta neighborhood has witnessed the construction of a great number of “châteaux” (often imitating those of the Loire valley in France), as well as Parisian style petits hôtels, almost always designed by architects of French origin.

Additionally, on the side streets of the neighborhood, there is a large number of rental properties of more practical design, whose compact structure and austere appearance contrast with the predominantly neoclassic style of much of Recoleta.

This may be due to fact that it displays a more recent design style than the average area of Recoleta, and of a visibly inferior quality of construction.

Along Córdoba Avenue, the western edge of the neighborhood, are two parks: Plaza Bernardo Houssay, filled with university students, artisans, and resellers of academic textbooks, and Plaza Monseñor De Andrea, at the intersection of Córdoba and Jean Jaurés Street, is a neighborhood area distinctive for its more everyday feel, where petits-hotels and grand buildings leave space for small homes, grocery stores and shops.

Of particular note, in the Plaza Francia facing the cemetery is an enormous rubber tree; its huge tentacle-like lower branches cast shade over La Biela's popular terrace.

At present, the Government of the City of Buenos Aires has reorganized the fair, encouraging the participation of those artisans whose work is original and authentic, and discouraging those whose merchandise is of low quality or those who simply sell mass-produced items.

Visitors to the fair may find all kinds of handicraft items, many of them of high quality: leather goods, book restoration, sandals and espadrilles, carved mates, ethnic jewelry, incense, essential oils, spices, satchels, candles, indigenous musical instruments, photography, and much more.

After the overthrow of President Juan Perón in 1955, the luxurious residence was demolished, and today, where it stood, now stands the National Library, work of the Italo-Argentine Clorindo Testa.

Other contemporary residents who have lent local color to the neighborhood are the comedian Carlos Balá and the iconoclastic musician Charly García.

A classic in the neighborhood, and the preferred locale of the Buenos Aires cultural elite, is the literary café, Clásica y Moderna, located on Callao Avenue at Paraguay Street.