The Antigua Tasca de Cuchilleros

Notice the low, whitewashed house in front of you. Among 19th- and 20th-century façades, it looks like it has drifted in from another age. And it probably has.

1A surviving colonial house

Its brick walls set in mud, straight wooden lintels, ceilings held up by quebracho and palm beams and its pitched tile roof are all hallmarks of colonial Buenos Aires building. That's why it's considered one of the oldest houses in the city. It's been said to date from around 1730, but no documents confirm that. Today it's a restaurant.

2The legend of Margarita

Neighbourhood tradition places the Oliden family here in the days of Juan Manuel de Rosas. The father, so the story goes, was a sergeant in the Mazorca, the regime's feared political police, and promised his daughter Margarita to the Mazorca chief Ciriaco Cuitiño. But she loved a travelling folk singer, a payador named Juan de la Cruz Cuello.

Locked in her room until the wedding, Margarita is said to have escaped down a well into a smugglers' tunnel that came out at the parish of San Pedro Telmo. The tale has two endings: in one, her own father kills her; in the other, she dies from a stray shot when Cuitiño catches up with the lovers.

They say the roses in the courtyard never bloomed again and the sergeant never reopened the windows.

No archive confirms Margarita or her payador. Cuitiño, on the other hand, was real.

3What to look for

• The arched window with its simple bars.
• The pitched tile roof, rare on this street.
• The whitewashed walls, set against the decorated façades next door.