Take a 1 hr train to visit El Tigre - a cute town near Buenos Aires

Finally I can go back to the main track of this blog - sharing about “how to plan” rather than “what to eat” 😂 When I start to share a lot about food, then you know my energy gets drained because of staying at the same place too long. (I was kinda stuck in Buenos Aires for extra days because of the strike 🥲) In that case, I need some food to get back the energy ha.

Table of Contents

• Logistic

  • Going to El Tigre from Buenos Aires

  • Buying Boat ticket

• My experience - trapped on the island?

• My thought about El Tigre

Logistic

Going to El Tigre from Buenos Aires

The easiest way to go to El Tigre is to take a train from la estacion de Retiro in Buenos Aires. Here’s the info:

1. You’ll have to take Mitre Line and route Retiro - Tigre.

2. It runs every 15 minutes and takes about 1 hour to get. (Full timetable can be found here)

3. You don’t have to prepare a train ticket in advance. You can just hop on by using your SUBE travel card like taking a metro. (Read: how to get a SUBE travel card here)

When you get to la estacion de Retiro, you’ll find the vibe very different from the one in Avenue de Mayo (main street). It's common to see people searching through public trash cans and gathering on the streets. It just didn’t feel that safe. So I don’t recommend coming to this area when it’s dark.

Buying Boat ticket

This was a spontaneous trip so I didn’t buy ticket online in advance. It turns out it’s totally fine to buy one in person! There are quite a few window processing ticket stuff, so there’s no long line to worry about. Terminal Fluvial de Tigre is the spot to buy ticket.  

My experience - trapped on the island?

After several days of being surrounded by the European-style streets of Buenos Aires, the canal views in El Tigre started to feel extra appealing. But there’s a twist here. When my hotel host heard that my partner and I were going to visit El Tigre, she suggested we got off the boat and visited a stop called “La Esmeralda”, which was what we did and almost got us caught in an island!

So when we got off the boat at La Esmeralda, we found out most of the areas are private lands. As a visitor, you can only walk along the small trails aside the lands and there are not many things to see. I quickly realized this isn’t for visitors. So it seems many of these islands along the canals are private and the stops are built to serve the needs of the residents on the mini islands. That’s why when I was in terminal, I saw many residents bringing groceries they bought in the shopping area and prepared to go back to the islands.

Staring at the somewhat turbulent canal and the simple boat stop, I started to worry about being stuck in the island 😬 - especially not knowing when the next boat would come. I couldn’t bear the risk of walking around and missing the next boat, so I decided to walk back to the stop quick and wait. 20 minutes later, a boat came! I quickly hopped onto the boat and realized I hadn’t felt this happy the whole trip…

My thought about El Tigre

If you’re looking to escape from Buenos Aires’s urban buzz and immerse yourself in nature, this is the perfect gateway! It seems to be a popular family weekend trip destination as well, probably because there’s an amusement park nearby.

I personally would rate it ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for its relaxing vibe and canal views. Lacking of 1 star is because the activities you can do there are relatively limited. Or maybe I was scared by trapping on the island? If you are gonna visit, take a boat tour is fine. Don’t bother visiting an unknown stop like I did 😂