The Port That Was Born Old: When Buenos Aires Chose Prestige Over Function

Corals that are gone, sargassum that persists, and why I keep designing journeys

I travelled with my father to the Riviera Maya in 2010 to complete our diving certification. We immersed ourselves in what was known as the second largest barrier reef in the world. Four unforgettable dives: we swam alongside giant turtles, crossed natural tunnels formed by coral, and, while parasailing, saw from the air the immensity of the Mexican Caribbean, with its turquoise, cobalt blue and emerald green stripes.

During four days of training, I paid 400 dollars to learn how to breathe underwater in front of such wonder. The phrase —“second largest barrier reef in the world”— I had found the night before on Wikipedia, thrilled to have such a treasure just nine hours from Buenos Aires. It felt like a privilege to see it, to have it here in the Americas.

Tour operators preferred other adjectives: “crystalline waters”, “unique biodiversity”, “unforgettable experience”.

I learned that nitrogen can kill you if you ascend too quickly, that moray eels may mistake your finger for a fish, that you should never touch coral. Nobody mentioned that the coral we were told not to touch was already dying. Silence was part of the product. We had paid for a dream, not for an ecology lesson.

Cozumel, with its famous coral walls, remained pending. But even then we knew the reefs were in danger.

The return and the invisible brigades

I went back in 2017, this time to Tulum, though I didn’t dive. Armed with Google Maps and determined to avoid crowds, I found a beach labelled by algorithms as a “hidden gem.” At six in the morning, waiting for the sunrise, I discovered another scene: cleaning brigades.

Four men with rakes and a pickup truck collected mountains of algae before the first tourists arrived. They worked silently, efficiently, invisibly. When I asked, one said: “It’s temporary, miss. Just currents.” But his eyes said otherwise. It was 2017 and sargassum had been arriving for six years. How long does “temporary” last when no one dares to name it?

Living in Mexico, I learned that sargassum was no longer a seasonal inconvenience but a crisis shaping every conversation about Caribbean tourism. The question was no longer if it would come, but how to hide it.

The new Caribbean vocabulary

I learned a coded language of the industry:

• “Variable natural conditions” (there is sargassum).
• “Authentic Caribbean experience” (you’ll see the reality outside postcards).
• “Coastal renewal season” (do not come these months).
• And the most perverse: “Opportunity to discover other attractions.” As if ecological collapse were an invitation to buy more tours.

What caught my attention: the conversation always focused on economic impact. Almost never on environmental effects. And rarely on the reef itself.

The sargassum belt

Since 2011, beaches once ranked among the cleanest in the world have received tons of floating algae called sargassum. What first seemed like an anomaly became an annual pattern, with increasingly severe consequences.

Sargassum —Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans— has always existed, drifting in the North Atlantic as part of a healthy ecosystem. The problem is scale: excess nutrients from the Amazon and Orinoco, global warming, altered currents. All combined to form the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, a strip of more than 8,000 kilometres of algae —the size of 800 Buenos Aires— that drifts every year from Africa to the Caribbean.

It doesn’t just ruin postcards. It blocks sunlight corals need, releases toxic gases as it decomposes, alters water pH, and fosters bacteria competing with reefs. All this while the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef already suffers bleaching, acidification, and pollution.

In Martinique, a school was forced to close because of the gases. In Barbados, hotel occupancy fell 40% as sargassum was removed by truckloads. In the Lesser Antilles, fishermen fought with tangled nets. Yet on Instagram, the Caribbean still looked unchanged.

The questions that change

In 2010 I asked: Where’s the best visibility? At what depth are the turtles? Is the water warm?

Now I ask: Why is the water hotter each year? What stories are left untold? For whom does this paradise exist? Does my presence speed its decline?

Sometimes I think my diving certification was also a historical document: Certified Open Water Diver, Riviera Maya, 2010. Translation: authorised to explore a world that once existed.

Travelling to remember

Sargassum is not just an aesthetic nuisance. It is a messenger insisting on speaking while we perfect the art of not listening. Like climate change, it feels enormous, complex, ungraspable. But one thing is within our reach: stop looking away. Name what is happening. Remember. Because sometimes, remembering coral is also a way of trying to save it.

While the Caribbean learned to hide its wound, I sought another sea. On the Pacific, the Sea of Cortez revealed biodiversity the Caribbean had already lost. In La Paz —not in Cabo’s all-inclusive resorts— I swam with sea lions, watched manta rays leap, realised that balance is still possible in some places.

It is not that resort tourism is the only cause of collapse. But when a place becomes a stage for unreflective consumption —drinks, parties, selfies— it loses its ability to teach, to transform. And without transformation, why travel?

Journeys with memory

At HeySole! I design journeys for those who, like me, seek more than crystalline waters. For those who understand that travel is also about bearing witness, asking questions, creating conscious memories.

Because knowing a place is not only about where to eat the best ceviche or find the quietest beach. It is about understanding its silences, its transformations, its beauty and its wounds.

If this text made you think differently about how we travel, share it. Because remembering a coral is also a way of caring for it.

Reading and visiting the classics to develop your own taste

On my first European grand tour, I avoided the destinations that top most Latin Americans’ compass: Spain and Italy. I threw myself into -20 degrees, layers of snow I’d never seen, different cultures. It was entertaining from every angle. But only when I arrived in Italy the following year did I understand the magnet: it wasn’t just the romanticism of roots, it was the cultural density I had already sensed in books, the one I recognized from my education and heritage. Reading Dante, Cervantes, Virgil had been theory; in Italy it became landscape, and everything clicked.

Reviewing my library, I discovered that my first wave was, predictably, the canon we’re invited to read when diving into literature. There was García Márquez with his Macondo of cyclical violence, where magic was the only way to narrate Latin America. The Bloomsbury Group salons, where Virginia Woolf discussed how to live and write differently, and Huxley criticized with one foot inside. The North American fever of the twenties, between clandestine cocktails and sequined dresses. The critique of the continent’s bloody roots: Rulfo’s desert silence, Fuentes’ blood, Padura’s Havana. And before all that, Homer, navigating the Mediterranean of wandering heroes and endless journeys.

This is the undisputed foundation: it orients, gives clues, sometimes bores and sometimes ignites. But it’s the initial map that everyone must accept or challenge before drawing their own library. Most of the time, the canon becomes a lighthouse. From there we discover our own taste and deepen into a style of narrative (and travel). In my library, essay-novels shine, with The Magic Mountain and its thousand pages inviting me to debate about pre-WWI European cuisine. The great open book on the world map full of pins and desires is Rome, the city I’ve returned to twelve times. From the Roman world to the Renaissance, Baroque, and Republic, there’s no historical gap that doesn’t captivate me.

To fill myself with something, I need density. After readings and travels through the old and new world, I learned that what I enjoy goes beyond, that reflects as well as entertains, that has layers, and depending on life’s moment, can be enjoyed each time from a different angle.

I saw someone on social media recently wondering why Munich doesn’t figure in essential European itineraries, and I think the answer lies in the canon. The German narrative we learn leads us first to Berlin: the Wall, historical memory, the weight of the 20th century. But Munich is another Germany, equally dense: capital of Bavaria, mirror of its architecture, its gastronomic festivals and folk traditions. It knows how to embrace the present without denying the past. The reading that best reflects Munich in my library is, precisely, Thomas Mann. It combines Germanic roots, bourgeois elegance, tension with modernity, and that air of a city that drinks beer under chestnut trees while safeguarding Gothic painting collections, infinite libraries, and tech company headquarters. The Germany where tradition and modernity coexist in tension appears as a second layer, less evident but equally essential.

Indeed, building our own collection of books, stories, cultures, communities, cities, and landscapes requires audacity and energy. I don’t mean this snobbishly, but practically: it takes time, resources, and also curiosity.

Sometimes it even takes courage to answer uncomfortable questions when we stray from the route everyone expects: why are you reading that contemporary author and not Proust? Tuscany again when you haven’t been to Galicia? But that questioning Faust is mainly within us, with internal questions: do I invest my precious free time discovering if the French, Swiss, Italian, or Austrian Alps resonate with me? What if it’s all the same?

In that small example lies a world: which Swiss Alps am I talking about? The beauty and luxury of St. Moritz on the frozen lake, where horse carriages compete for prizes while we savor sparkling wine served by a waiter on ice skates? The ski and mountaineering life of Zermatt, the conscientious village where the few vehicles are electric, and the constant view of the Matterhorn reminds us that this is the nature we want to keep pristine?

Though I briefly visited St. Moritz three times, I would undoubtedly spend weeks and weeks in different seasons under the Matterhorn, walking its trails, gliding down slopes, discovering Italian faces and French peaks from above. It’s not that luxury discomforts me, but I didn’t find in it the vitality I found in Zermatt.

In photographs everything seems beautiful, no doubt. But living it, like turning the pages of a book, we discover what opens our curiosity. A curiosity fed by walks, questions to locals, readings, and where I find pleasure. The path can sometimes be heavy. There are fogs where we read or visit only because everyone else does. Soon comes that bloodhound moment when you smell what’s yours. By instinct, guided by booksellers, reader friends, travelers, or a curious friend like me, you can reach your truffle.

That’s how I found María Gainza: thoroughly porteña, art lover, social critic, autobiographical essayist who plays with literature. From the first pages of The Optic Nerve, I realized that those analyses of Buenos Aires museum artworks interwoven with slightly satirical autobiographical tales captivated me. The architectural beauty and political power of the Savoys’ brief kingdom that nevertheless unified Italy led me to Turin to eat gianduiotti (and white truffles in nearby Alba). Discovering these jewels, by myself, was worth every reading and every journey. The risk of being wrong is always in the air, but the reward is so great that I keep sniffing the wind, searching for the next treasure my nose will lead me to.

It’s not about collecting prestigious destinations or authors. It’s about recognizing what makes you feel more alive, more curious, more yourself.

What place or book made you understand you could draw your own map?

A slow logbook of panoramic trains, alpine villages and medieval fortresses. Beyond the clichés of watches and chocolate, Switzerland reveals its depth.

A nation of transitions

With four official languages and strong cantonal autonomy, there is no single Switzerland. Nor a single way to discover it. On this journey, we chose to avoid the big cities and focus on the south.

For two weeks we travelled on its famous trains: precise, elegant, silent. We added funiculars that climb mountains, cogwheel trains, and boats tracing routes along millenary shores. We discovered that Switzerland is understood through transitions: from one canton to another, from one language to the next, from snow to flowers, from silence to street fairs with live music. To understand Switzerland is to accept change as the rule, and contrast as its identity.

From Ticino to the line of glaciers

The route began near Lake Como, at the border between the canton of Ticino and the south of Graubünden, where we boarded the Bernina Express bound for St. Moritz.

The train climbs from Val Poschiavo, a green and Mediterranean region which, though fully Swiss, speaks Italian and lives at its own rhythm. Its agricultural terraces and gentle landscape contrast with the glacial world that opens up at altitude.

Crossing Ospizio Bernina (2,253 m) is not only the highest point of the route, but also a geographical threshold. Beside it, Lake Bianco—milky white from the minerals of the Palü glacier—contrasts with the darker Lake Nero, as if water itself spoke in different tones. Their colours tell a bifurcated story: the waters of the Bianco flow towards the Adriatic, while those of the Nero run to the Danube and the Black Sea. At this point, even the language shifts: we left Italian behind and entered the Romansh-speaking zone of Graubünden.

St. Moritz and luxury without belonging

In contrast with Italy, St. Moritz felt somewhat soulless. Perhaps because of the distance imposed by extreme luxury; perhaps because the snow season was ending. When belonging is measured through consumption, the place loses depth.

We preferred instead the image of the frozen lake yielding under the spring sun, and walking around it to see the mountains from every angle. It was a tactical pause: enough to observe without being absorbed.

The Glacier Express and history in motion

The following morning we boarded the Glacier Express, Switzerland’s most iconic train. For eight hours we did not simply cross the country: it was more than a journey, it was a display.

From the geometric void of the Rhine Gorge to the snow-covered Oberalp Pass where only the wind could be heard. In Disentis, the canton’s oldest monastery taught us that the word münster—familiar from Germany’s Black Forest—comes from the Latin monasterium: long before the Confederation there was life, frescoes, and onion-domed architecture.

In Trun the 14th-century peace treaty that gave birth to unified Switzerland was signed. In Andermatt, where trains, roads and tunnels converge, stands the Saint Gotthard Pass, the country’s backbone.

Every window of the train brought a new lesson: a typical dish (capuns), a 17-kilometre tunnel, an energy fact (60% of Swiss electricity comes from water, and nuclear plants will close in 2025). Each fact was not just information: it was part of the way Switzerland reveals itself. Everything had weight. Everything had form.

Zermatt: the alpine village par excellence

Arriving in Zermatt was entering another dimension. The Matterhorn, omnipresent, seemed to guard not only the Italian border, but also the skiers still enjoying a long season. Late snow had piled up more than five metres, a mantle that still descended the slopes.

We walked among ancient dark wooden houses with stone bases, not only in Zmutt but also in the village centre, where ancestral forms coexist with the technical sophistication of the present.

On the hikes towards Furi we passed through two hamlets where we learned that these 15th-century structures—mountain shelters for shepherds and peasants—were raised on pillars with round stones designed to block rodents. Their larch walls, blackened by time, remain firm; their stone-slab roofs protect the buildings through centuries.

A small museum on high-altitude farming taught us about rye, transhumance and the harsh life of those who lived here long before tourism. Switzerland was not always wealthy: it was, first, resilient.

The transport systems to the summits are feats of engineering that operate with almost invisible elegance. The modern, silent Matterhorn Glacier Paradise cableway took us up to 3,883 metres: the highest point in Europe accessible without climbing. From there, with temperatures below zero, we looked over more than thirty 4,000-metre peaks and fourteen glaciers stretching across Switzerland, Italy and France.

By contrast, the old cogwheel train to Gornergrat carried us to 3,089 metres. The view opened to new peaks and other faces of the Matterhorn. We had planned to stay two hours but spent the entire day. Not only for the imposing presence of the Matterhorn, but for the amphitheatre of glaciers unfolding around it.

Accumulated snow blocked the planned trails, but revealed another way of seeing the mountain: the silence of the Gorner glacier, extended like a tongue that cracked and groaned as it descended, demanded pause. We picnicked on a bench among the ice, while alpine choughs tried to steal our lunch. We listened to the wind filtering between the peaks: a silence that was not absence, but the full presence of place.

We also visited the mountaineers’ cemetery, where the dates of the first expeditions spoke of risk, skill and will. Fascinatingly, we learned that while the Swiss side has permanent life, the Italian side has no settlements, though it hosts a dense network of slopes, refuges and high-altitude restaurants. A mountain “empty” of villages is, in fact, intensely lived through sport.

We shared a local soup with skiers arriving from the other side. Advertised in German as “grandmother’s soup”, it was more than food: it was a meeting point, a shared gesture in a landscape crossed on skis or boots.

Vaud and the Swiss Riviera

From there we packed to cross into the canton of Vaud. It was more than a language change. Everything softened: the Lavaux terraces, paths lined with wildflowers—and others meticulously planted—, boats anchored before Art Nouveau villages.

In Les Avants we looked for daffodils; in Clarens we descended on foot through lime trees; and on Lake Geneva we sailed on a Belle Époque steamboat still propelled by its original oil machinery, like a floating museum. Glasses of local wine served in deckchairs on the upper deck made the journey unforgettable.

Montreux surprised us with its floral display. Tulips of every shape and colour, arranged with almost curatorial aesthetics, turned the lake promenade into a moving garden. Running there at dawn was revealing: I saw bulbs being changed, new aromas rising from aromatic beds, spring organised with method and care.

Higher up, on the slopes, we saw what the late snow had hidden in Zermatt: transhumance. Sheep and cows with bells ascending to fresh pastures marked the season with ancestral precision.

Lavaux was perhaps the perfect summary of Swiss contrast: vineyards cultivated for centuries where 98% of the wine is consumed domestically. A local jewel thriving thanks to three suns: the one in the sky, the reflection from the lake, and the heat the terraces’ stones release at dusk.

Everything seemed to obey a secret logic: the logic of care.

Borders, fortresses and the art of passage

Before becoming a tourist destination, Switzerland was a passage: a geography to cross, but also to defend. We visited castles such as Chillon, on Lake Geneva, and those of Bellinzona, whose fortified trio—Castelgrande, Montebello and Sasso Corbaro—speaks of a time when borders were not abstract lines but points of watch, toll and shelter.

In Bellinzona, their strategic arrangement follows a logic of surveillance dating back to Roman times, perfected in the 15th century by the Dukes of Milan—first the Visconti, then the Sforza.

Further west, Chillon Castle controlled traffic along the narrow path skirting cliffs between Vaud and Valais. It is no coincidence that nearby lies the Saint-Maurice Pass, a historic gateway to the upper Rhône Valley.

These fortresses remind us that the Alps are not only a natural barrier but also a network of strategic corridors. Switzerland is a land of passes: Gotthard, Bernina, Simplon, Oberalp. Paths once used by people, armies and goods—sometimes slowly, sometimes stealthily, sometimes with warrior spirit.

Today, where customs stood, there are platforms. Where there was control, there is crossing.

Lugano and Locarno: the south also exists

Back in Italian-speaking Switzerland, Lugano reminded us that the south also exists. We walked its main avenue, among elegant shops and noble façades, down to Parco Ciani, where benches face the water with serenity. We rented a boat and crossed beyond the Italian border: an unmarked frontier, visible in the tones of houses, the shape of hills, the music in the background.

We ended in Locarno, between a food-truck fair in Piazza Grande and the solemnity of the Santuario della Madonna del Sasso. Built after friar Bartolomeo Piatti claimed to see the Virgin on the rock in 1480, the sanctuary rises above a town that today combines baroque masses above with street food below. That simultaneity—between the elevated and the earthly, the Swiss and the Italian, the precise and the lived—was perhaps the best synthesis of the trip.

Valle Verzasca: a Switzerland without showcases

We closed the journey in Valle Verzasca, built around the emerald river that gives it its name. Its stone villages are spanned by the Ponte dei Salti, a medieval two-arched bridge at Lavertezzo that seems drawn from a tale.

On the hike to Sonogno waterfall we encountered sculptures carved in tree trunks: part of an artistic trail linking nature, culture and contemporary art with deep respect for the alpine surroundings. A more authentic farewell. More rural. A Switzerland without showcases.

Travelling through Switzerland is not following a straight line. It is accepting that countries are also narrated in layers: by trains, yes, but also by valleys; by impeccable infrastructure, from a punctual bus to a funicular floating among peaks; and by the way everything integrates into the rhythm of landscape.

Switzerland does not impose itself: it works with precision, but it is felt with wonder.

If this read made you want to travel at a slower pace—or to look differently at the world you already know—share it with someone who also appreciates slow rhythms, good trains and stories told in layers.

My itineraries are designed for that: to make you feel, be amazed, learn, and return with memories that cannot be bought.

If you are dreaming of your next journey, write to me.