[ GUIDE · THE DISPATCH ]

Getting Around Buenos Aires: The Subte, the SUBE Card, and Taxi-vs-App Reality

How I cracked getting around Buenos Aires after one humid afternoon of doing it all wrong: the SUBE card, the colectivo maze, and the cash trick that paid for my steak dinner.

For the full day-by-day version of everything below, read the Buenos Aires itinerary with an interactive map.

Getting around Buenos Aires looks chaotic for about a day, and then it clicks, and then you feel like a genius. I promise. The first time I tried to ride the Subte I stood at the Línea D turnstile in Plaza Italia jabbing coins at a machine that wanted nothing to do with me, while a teenager behind me sighed the sigh of a thousand confused tourists. I’d skipped the one thing you cannot skip.

The SUBE card.

This is the rechargeable transit card that runs the Subte, the colectivos (city buses), and most trains. Without it you basically can’t move. You buy one for a small fee at kiosks (those little corner newsstands marked “SUBE” in the window), at some subway stations, and at the Centro de Atención. Then you “cargá” it — load it with pesos — at the same kiosks or the machines.

Load more than you think. A single Subte ride is cheap, comically cheap if you’ve got dollars, but the load machines can be fussy and the kiosk guy isn’t always thrilled to top you up for the equivalent of forty cents. I put on a chunk at a time and stopped worrying about it.

One card can pay for two or three people, by the way. Just tap, tap, tap as you board. Saved me buying extras for friends who were only in town a weekend.

Here’s my hot take: the Subte (the metro) is genuinely useful but weirdly limited. Six lines, mostly funneling you in and out of the center, and it shuts around 10–11pm which for a city that eats dinner at 10 is almost a joke. It gets sweaty in summer. Línea A still runs some of the old wooden-trimmed carriages on certain runs and that’s a small delight.

But the colectivos are where the city really opens up. There are hundreds of routes, they run all night, and they go everywhere the Subte doesn’t. The catch is the network looks insane on paper. Don’t read the paper. Open an app — the Cómo Llego app from the city, or just Google Maps — type where you want to go, and it’ll tell you the bus number and the corner. Tap your SUBE when you get on, and the driver asks for nothing more.

When you board, tell the driver roughly where you’re headed if the fare varies, then tap. The machine beeps. You’re in. Grab a seat near the back if you can because the front fills fast.

Black-and-yellow taxis are everywhere and mostly fine. Mostly. The classic scam is the bill swap — you hand over a 10,000-peso note, the driver palms it and shows you a smaller one, claiming you underpaid. Sounds paranoid until it happens to you near Retiro at night, which, well. Pay with smaller notes, say the amount out loud as you hand it over, and you sidestep most of it.

Honestly though I used Cabify and the local apps for most rides. Price is fixed up front, no meter games, no “the machine is broken” routine, and you’re not standing on a dark corner doing currency math. Uber works too but its legal status here has been a long-running soap opera, so I leaned on Cabify and slept fine.

For the airport — Ezeiza is the far one — book a remís (a private car service) or a fixed-fare app ride. Don’t grab a random tout inside the terminal. The official desks are fine if you want a counter to argue with later.

Okay, the money angle, because it changes everything about your trip costs. Argentina has long had a parallel exchange rate — the “blue dollar” — that’s gotten you noticeably more pesos for your physical US dollars than any card or ATM. Rates move constantly (check Ámbito’s “dólar blue” before you go), but the gap has been real for years.

What this means on the ground: bring crisp, clean physical dollars. Hundreds work best. You change them at a cueva (an informal exchange) or, increasingly, through services friends recommend — ask your hostel or a local you trust, because the scene shifts. Suddenly your whole transport budget, plus a parrilla dinner with a bottle of Malbec, costs what a single cab ride home would in your own city.

I changed three hundred bucks my second day and it funded a week. A week. Of buses, taxis, steak, and one slightly regrettable late-night empanada run.

Tap your card for the cheap stuff. Keep cash for everything else and for the rate. That’s the whole game.

A few odds and ends I wish I’d known sooner: the Subte gets brutally packed at rush hour around 6pm, so shift your sightseeing earlier. Walking Palermo and San Telmo beats any transit — half my favorite blocks I found getting lost on foot near Plaza Dorrego. And keep your SUBE topped up, because running dry at a turnstile while a porteño grandmother tuts behind you is a specific kind of shame I do not wish on you.

You’ll have it sorted by day two. Then you’ll be the one sighing at the next confused tourist.

Load the SUBE, ride the colectivos, carry dollars — do those three and Buenos Aires turns from chaos into the easiest big city you’ve ever wandered.

This article contains affiliate links marked rel="sponsored". We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.