Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times David Lampson, from Boston, and Maria Faccioti, of Argentina, tango at Salón Canning.

THE tango dancers took their places inside a cramped apartment in downtown Buenos Aires, as David Lampson, a 29-year-old television writer from Boston, wiped his brow. Despite the 100-degree weather, the fans had been shut off, spotlights switched on and windows blacked out with trash bags. The cameraman waited until the smoke machine blurred the parquet floor before yelling “Action!” Then just as the iTunes track reached its dramatic crescendo, the fuse blew. For the fourth time.

“Let’s unplug the other fan and try again,” Mr. Lampson told the polyglot cast and crew, which included a Greek mother, a Colombian architect and an Argentine shoemaker. Also present was a NYC film student, who was editing the footage for YouTube distribution. Mr. Lampson likened the process to creating art from garbage. “There is a tango dance based on this idea,” he added, “called cambalache.”

A better term might be bohemians-in-exile. A new kind of tango is taking shape along the crooked back streets of Buenos Aires. At a former furniture factory on Calle Honduras, the British music engineer Tom Rixton, who has worked with top acts like Despecho Mode, runs a stylish boutique hotel called Home with his Argentine wife. Nearby on Calle Garruchaga, Amanda Knauer, a fashion designer from Manhattan, sells a chic line of leather handbags at Qara. And at Zizek, a weekly dance party run by an expat from San Antonio, the cha-ch-ch-cha rhythms of cumbia folk music quivers to an electronic beat.

“There are expats everywhere tapping into the city’s thriving cultural and arts scene,” said Grant C. Dull, Zizek’s founder, who also runs the popular bilingual Web guide Whats up Buenos Aire.com. “And it’s not backpacker types, but people with money and contacts.”

Drawn by the city’s cheap prices and Paris-like elegance, legions of foreign artists are colonizing Buenos Aires and transforming this sprawling metropolis into a throbbing hothouse of cool. Musicians, designers, artists, writers and filmmakers are sinking their teeth into the city’s transcontinental mix of Latin élan and European polish, and are helping shake the Argentine capital out of its cultural malaise after a humbling economic crisis earlier this decade.

Video directors are scouting tango ballrooms for English-speaking actors. Wine-soaked gallery openings and behemoth gay discos are keeping the city’s insomniacs up till sunrise. And artists from the United States, England, Italy and beyond are snapping up town houses in scruffy neighborhoods and giving the areas Anglo-ized names like Palermo SoHo and Palermo Hollywood.

Comparisons with other bohemian capitals are almost unavoidable. “It’s like Prague in the 1990s,” said Mr. Lampson, who is perhaps best known for winning a Bravo TV reality show, “Situation: Comedy,” in 2005, about sitcom writers. Despite his minor celebrity, he decided to forgo the Los Angeles rat race and moved to Buenos Aires, where he is writing an NBC pilot, along with his Web novela, historyandthe universse.com. “Buenos Aires is a more interesting place to live than Los Angeles, and it’s much, much cheaper. You can’t believe a city this nice is so cheap.”

That wasn’t always the case. For much of the 20th century, Buenos Aires ranked among the world’s most expensive capitals, on par with Paris and New York. Broad boulevards were lined with splendid specimens of French belle époque architecture that evoked the Champs-Élysées, and tree-lined streets were buzzing with late-night cafes and oak-and-brass bars. Locals, it is often said, identify more as European than South American.

Then came the financial crisis of late 2001. The Argentine peso, which was once pegged to the United States dollar, plunged to a low of nearly 4 to 1 in the face of mounting debt and runaway inflation. (It holds steadily today at about 3 to 1.) Overnight, Buenos Aires went from being among the priciest cities to one of the world’s great bargain spots.

There was a silver lining. Even as local artists flocked overseas, producing a kind of creative brain drain from Buenos Aires, foreigners arrived in record numbers. And what they discovered was that this fast-paced city of three million offered more than just tango and cheap steaks. The Argentine capital also had balmy weather, hedonistic night life and a cosmopolitan air that thrives on novelty.

Situated at the wide mouth of the Río de la Plata, Buenos Aires sprawls across the flat landscape with the force of a concrete hurricane. It takes more than an hour to traverse opposite ends by yellow-and-black taxi. And that’s not mentioning the 48 barrios that creep inland, each with a distinct personality and crisscrossed by a web of cobblestone alleys and 12-lane mega-streets. There are business districts like Microcentro, leafy barrios like Recoleta and manufacturing sectors like La Paterna.

And nearly everywhere you turn these days, the new arrivals seem to be planting their flags, whether at a so-called chorizo house in historic San Telmo or a glassy condo in Puerto Madero. Or, for that matter, a former door factory on Calle Aguirre, which Sebastiano Mauri, 35, a painter and video artist from Milan, recently bought with several artists on the industrial outskirts of Palermo.

“Some are now calling this area Palermo Brooklyn,” said Mr. Mauri during a recent visit of his renovated factory, a bright yellow building on an otherwise gray street. Cost for the entire four-story factory? $130,000. “Buenos Aires makes Milan look like a neighborhood. It’s lively, multiethnic and you have Europeans from all over.”

After gutting the third floor, Mr. Mauri spent the past year converting it into an artist-in-residence studio with hardwood floors, stainless-steel kitchen cabinets and midcentury-modern furniture. To celebrate the near-completion, he held a rooftop barbecue on a breezy Saturday in January that drew a cross section of Buenos Aires’s art elite.

Drinking malbec out of plastic cups and eating steaks with dollops of ratatouille, the crowd of about 20 artists, curators and collectors chatted easily about the hyper-commercialized state of art, a towering sex hotel (known as a telo) nearby and the city’s obsession with ice cream. “Artists come here because they can be free,” said Florencia Braga Menéndez, whose namesake contemporary art gallery is arguably the city’s most influential. “As a gallerist, I never tell my artists what sells. They must create for themselves.”

That creative freedom has fueled plenty of cultural cross-pollination. Dick Verdult, an avant-garde musician and artist from the Netherlands began toying with cumbia around 2000, manipulating the childish rhythms of the South American folk music with electronic bass lines, time delays and sampled voices. “Cumbia is like a ball of clay,” said Mr. Verdult, 53, who is better known by his stage name, Dick El Demasiado. “If you stick to the simple laws” — a 4/4 rhythm that he likens to a galloping horse — “but disregard the tradition, you can do a lot with it. Argentina has a very elastic culture.”

His first cumbia album, “No Nos Dejamos Afeitar,” released in 2002, was so well received that Mr. Verdult decided to move to Buenos Aires. “The reaction blew me away,” said Mr. Verdult, who is regarded as the unofficial godfather of this new electrotango sound known as experimental cumbia.

Not surprisingly, many of his disciples are fellow expatriates. “There’s a group of maybe 10 producers and D.J.’s who are really pushing these new styles,” said Gavin Burnett, 26, a D.J. from San Francisco who blends cumbia with hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall under the pseudonym Oro11. “If you’re an artist looking to be inspired and have $10,000 saved up, you can basically come down here and work, and not worry for a year.”

It’s not only artist types who are soaking up Buenos Aires’s budget bohemia. Stumble into many of the city’s trendy restaurants, bars and hotels, and there’s a good chance a foreigner is behind it.

One of the newest is Le Bar, a martini lounge and restaurant in Microcentro with sunken seats, cool lighting and a rooftop terrace. It was started by several French expatriates including Manuel Schmidt, 40, an architect from Paris who sailed to Argentina with his wife and young daughter three years ago, and basically didn’t sail back. Brasserie Petanque, a new restaurant in San Telmo, looks as though it was transplanted tile by tile from the Left Bank. “When I came in 2003, there were no French restaurants, so I stayed and opened this,” said Pascal Meyer, an owner who was tending bar on a recent Sunday night. Before becoming a restaurateur in Buenos Aires, he was a culinary tour guide for the UN in New York City.

AND then there are the novelists, journalists and screenwriters, quietly tapping away in their $600-a-month apartments, seeking to make a name for themselves on Argentine soil. Nate Martin, a 24-year-old from Wyoming, moved to the city in November and took a job as an editor at The Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language newspaper, because, he says, “I didn’t want to be a waiter while writing.” For his creative outlet, Mr. Martin maintains a blog, Grating Space. Like dozens of similar blogs written by foreigners, it rhapsodizes about the Argentine good life. He also D.J.’s on the side.

“We play stuff that they’ve never heard of,” said his friend, Tom Masterson, a 35-year-old transplant from Chicago, during a night out at Bahrein, a stylish sweatbox in Microcentro where the headlining D.J. hailed from Belgium. “They love me here.”

Some literary efforts are starting to bear fruit. The writer Marina Palmer quit her advertising job in New York City, moved to Buenos Aires and, in 2005, published a “Sex in the City”-like memoir set in the city’s vampish tango scene. “Kiss and Tango” has been optioned by Hollywood, with Sandra Bullock recently floated as a possible lead.

But moviemaking is hardly restricted to foreigners. Argentina has a storied film history — notable examples include the 1968 political documentary “The Hour of the Furnaces” and the post-junta feature, “Official Story,” which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1986 — and, in recent years, a so-called New Argentine Cinema has emerged, thanks to a new crop of directors like Daniel Burman and Lucrecia Martel who are winning prizes in film festivals. They have set up shop along the fringes of fashionable Palermo, in an area now known as Palermo Hollywood.

As with other creative fields, the cinematic revival got some unexpected help from the financial crisis. Not only did the industry benefit from the influx of foreigners looking for cheap production costs, but the peso meltdown also provided grist for creative self-examination. “People were no longer talking about pretty dresses or soap operas,” said Tomi Streiff, a filmmaker who moved to Buenos Aires from New York City with his partner and fellow screenwriter, Jane Hallisey. The couple is now working on a romantic comedy about a priest. “Everybody was hurt, so their skin was open.”

The wellspring of creativity is starting to leech out of Buenos Aires and onto the larger cultural stage. Local fashion designers, who flourished when European imports tripled in price, are making inroads into the global marketplace. Tramando, a high-end fashion store in Recoleta started by Martin Churba, now has boutiques in Tokyo and the meatpacking district in New York. And Maria Cher, a London-trained designer who has an airy boutique in Palermo SoHo, exports her glamorous dresses throughout SouthAmerica, as well as to Tokyo.

Experimental cumbia music is reverberating beyond the city’s packed dance floors. Mr. Burnett, the D.J., just started his own cumbia record label, Bersa Discos, and is playing shows in his native San Francisco. Zizek, the weekly dance party, is taking its urban tropical beats throughout the United States, with stops this month in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin.

Buenos Aires’s buzzing art scene, meanwhile, is being touted as the next big thing. Or that’s the hope, anyway, of the city’s eager artists and wide-eyed gallerists. “This city reminds me a lot of Berlin,” said Elisa Freudenreich, 27, a gallery manger who recently moved from Berlin and sees parallels in the profusion of street artists and graffiti-splattered spaces. “The scene is very fresh, very underground.”

Scruffy galleries have gone up along the city’s edges, most notably Appetite, an irreverent, punk-inflected gallery in San Telmo started by Daniela Luna, a feisty 30-year-old known for her shrewd eye and cool parties. On a steamy Thursday afternoon, as office workers were climbing aboard buses back home, Ms. Luna was flitting through her grungy gallery in a brown miniskirt and sparkly pink T-shirt, like a teenager in a vintage clothing store.

“My first gallery was so messy that when people came to my parties, they didn’t know if the stuff was art or trash,” Ms. Luna said, as she showed off works by Santiago Iturralde, a local artist who paints portraits of narcissistic young men based on their Facebook-like Web profiles. “We’re growing fast and furious.” So fast, in fact, that she is exporting her cheeky blend of trash art to the real Brooklyn, where she just opened a small gallery.

Her gallery will get additional exposure in Milan when the contemporary art fair, MiArt 2008, spotlights emerging Buenos Aires artists in April. Adriana Forconi, a jet-settling consultant to the art fair, was in town recently to scout for worthy galleries, and was struck by what she calls the city’s “frenetic and blissfully chaotic” pace.

“There’s definitely something happening here,” said Ms. Forconi, who was among the guests at the artist-filled rooftop barbecue. Dressed in a flouncy party dress and strappy sandals, she looked ready for another long night on the town. “There’s a clash between European and Latin American cultures that’s fascinating.”

“And unlike Milan, there are no rules,” Ms. Forconi added, as she looked out at the twinkling city and took a sip of wine. For a moment, she sounded like someone toying with a move to Buenos Aires. “You can do whatever you want here.”

Important Latam historic sites

Manzana de las Luces, Buenos Aires, Argentina: The Manzana de las Luces (Block of Lights) served as the intellectual center of the city in the 17th and 18th centuries. This land was granted in 1616 to the Jesuits, who built San Ignacio -- the city's oldest church -- still standing at the corner of Bolivar and Aslina streets. It's worth a visit to see the beautiful altar.

Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires, Argentina: The majestic Teatro Colon, completed in 1908, combines a variety of European styles, from the Ionic and Corinthian capitals and French stained-glass pieces in the main entrance to the Italian marble staircase and exquisite French furniture, chandeliers, and vases in the Golden Hall. The Colon has hosted the world's most important opera singers.

Tiwanaku, Bolivia: The Tiwanaku lived in Bolivia from 1600 B.C. to A.D. 1200. Visit the Tiwanaku archaeological site, which is about 2 hours from La Paz, and you'll see proof of some of the amazing feats of this pre-Columbian culture. The stone-carved Sun Gate could gauge the position of the sun. The technologically advanced irrigation system transformed this barren terrain into viable farmland. The enormous and intricately designed stone-carved monoliths found here give testament to the amazing artistic talents of these people. Much here still remains a mystery, but when you walk around the site, it's exciting to imagine what life must have been like here for the Tiwanaku.

Potosi, Bolivia: Once one of the richest cities in the world, and now one of the poorest, Potosi is a fascinating but tragic place. A silver mining town that once bankrolled the Spanish Empire, Potosi is a high-altitude relic featuring beautiful church architecture and primitive mining, both of which you can experience firsthand.

Brasilia, Brazil: Built from scratch in a matter of years on the red soil of the dry cerrado, Brasilia is an oasis of modernism in Brazil's interior. Marvel at the clean lines and functional forms and admire some of the best modern architecture in the world.

Pelourinho, Brazil: The restored historical center of Salvador is a treasure trove of baroque churches, colorful colonial architecture, steep cobblestone streets, and large squares.

San Pedro de Atacama, Chiu Chiu, and Caspana, Chile: The driest desert in the world has one perk: Everything deteriorates very, very slowly. This is good news for travelers in search of the architectural roots of Chile, where villages such as San Pedro, Chiu Chiu, and Caspana boast equally impressive examples of 17th-century colonial adobe buildings and the sun-baked ruins of the Atacama Indian culture; some sites date from 800 B.C. Highlights undoubtedly are the enchanting, crumbling San Francisco Church of Chiu Chiu and the labyrinthine streets of the indigenous fort Pukara de Lasana.

Chiloe Island, Chile: Chiloe's historical appeal is in large part derived from the fact that many citizens live much as they did 200 years ago, tilling fields with an ox and a plow, plying the coves with rickety wooden fishing skiffs, and hand-knitting sweaters to keep out the cold. Chiloe is home to a rare display of antique ecclesiastical architecture in the form of hundreds of 17th- and 18th-century wooden churches, two dozen of which were recently named a World Patrimony by UNESCO.

Cartagena, Colombia: Declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984, the old-walled city of Cartagena is the greatest living outdoor museum dedicated to Spanish colonial history. A walk through one of Cartagena's narrow, cobblestone streets, complete with centuries-old Spanish mansions, flower-strewn balconies, and horse-drawn carriages showing tourists around town, might make you feel as if you've stepped onto the set of a colonial-era telenovela. Best of all, the fines attractions -- the plazas, the fortress, and most of the churches -- are free.

Quito's Old Town, Ecuador: When you walk around old Quito, you will feel as if you have stepped back in time. The oldest church here dates from 1535, and it's still magnificent. La Compania de Jesus only dates from 1765, but it is one of the most impressive baroque structures in all of South America. It's rare to find a city with so many charming colonial-style buildings. When you wander through the streets, it really seems as if you are walking through an outdoor museum.

The Nasca Lines, Peru: One of South America's great enigmas are the ancient, baffling lines etched into the desert sands along Peru's southern coast. There are trapezoids and triangles, identifiable shapes of animal and plant figures, and more than 10,000 lines that can only really be seen from the air. Variously thought to be signs from the gods, agricultural and astronomical calendars, or even extraterrestrial airstrips, the Nasca Lines were constructed between 300 B.C. and A.D. 700.

Cusco, Peru: Cusco, the ancient Inca capital, is a living museum of Peruvian history, with Spanish colonial churches and mansions sitting atop perfectly constructed Inca walls of exquisitely carved granite blocks that fit together without mortar. In the hills above the city lie more terrific examples of Inca masonry: the zigzagged defensive walls of Sacsayhuaman and the smaller ruins of Q'enko, Puca Pucara, and Tambomachay.

Iglesia de San Francisco, Caracas, Venezuela: This is the church where Simon Bolivar was proclaimed El Libertador in 1813, and the site of his massive funeral in 1842 -- the year his remains were brought back from Colombia some 12 years after his death. Begun in 1575, the church shows the architectural influences of various periods and styles, but retains much of its colonial-era charm.

The best Latam museums

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires: This museum contains the world's largest collection of Argentine sculptures and paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries. It also houses European art dating from the pre-Renaissance period to the present day. The collections include notable pieces by Manet, Goya, El Greco, and Gauguin.

MALBA-Coleccion Constantini, Buenos Aires: This stunning new private museum houses one of the most impressive collections of Latin American art anywhere. Temporary and permanent exhibitions showcase such names as Antonio Berni, Pedro Figari, Frida Kahlo, Candido Portinari, Diego Rivera, and Antonio Sigui. Many of the works confront social issues and explore questions of national identity.

Museu de Arte Sacra, Salvador: When you walk into this small but splendid museum, what you hear is not the usual gloomy silence but the soft sweet sound of Handel. It's a small indication of the care curators have taken in assembling and displaying one of Brazil's best collections of Catholic art -- reliquaries, processional crosses, and crucifixes of astonishing refinement. The artifacts are shown in a former monastery, a simple, beautiful building that counts itself as a work of art.

Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro: It's impossible to miss the MAM. It's a long, large, rectangular building lofted off the ground by an arcade of concrete struts, giving the structure the appearance of an airplane wing. Inside are walls of solid plate glass that welcome in both city and sea. Displays present the best of contemporary art from Brazil and Latin America.

Museo Arqueologico Padre Le Paige, San Pedro de Atacama: This little museum will come as an unexpected surprise for its wealth of indigenous artifacts, although the museum's famous mummies have been taken off display due to ethical questions. Still, considering that the Atacama Desert is the driest in the world, this climate has produced some of the best-preserved artifacts in Latin America, on view here.

Museo del Oro, Bogota: With over 20,000 pieces of gold, the Museo del Oro offers the largest collection of its kind in the world, providing a visual history of Colombia and Latin America from the pre-Columbian era to the Spanish conquest. Taking a guided tour of the museum is one of the best ways to learn about the indigenous groups that inhabited modern-day Colombia before the arrival of the Spaniards. Whatever you do, don't leave Bogota without visiting the top-floor gold room, a dazzling display of 8,000 pieces of gold.

Fundacion Guayasamin, Quito: Oswaldo Guayasamin was Ecuador's greatest and most famous modern artist. His striking large paintings, murals, and sculptures had an impact on artists across Latin America and around the world. This extensive museum displays both his own work and pieces from his collection. Combined with the neighboring Capilla del Hombre, this is a must-see for any art lover or Latin American history buff.

Museo de la Nacion, Lima: Lima is the museum capital of Peru, and the National Museum traces the art and history of the earliest inhabitants to the Inca Empire, the last before colonization by the Spaniards. In well-organized, chronological exhibits, it covers the country's unique architecture (including scale models of most major ruins in Peru) as well as ceramics and textiles.

Monasterio de Santa Catalina and Museo Santuarios Andinos, Arequipa: The Convent of Santa Catalina, founded in 1579, is the greatest religious monument in Peru. More than a convent, it's an extraordinary and evocative small village, with Spanish-style cobblestone streets, passageways, plazas, and cloisters, where more than 200 sequestered nuns once lived (only a handful remain). Down the street at the Museo Santuarios Andinos is a singular exhibit: Juanita, the Ice Maiden of Ampato. A 13- or 14-year-old girl sacrificed in the 1500s by Inca priests high on a volcano at 6,380m (20,926 ft.), "Juanita" was discovered in almost perfect condition in 1995.

Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Sofia Imber, Caracas: Occupying 13 rooms spread out through the labyrinthine architecture of Caracas's Parque Central, the permanent collection here features a small but high-quality collection of singular works by such modern masters as Picasso, Red Grooms, Henry Moore, Joan Miro, and Francis Bacon, as well as a good representation of the conceptual works of Venezuelan star Jesus Soto.

Some Latam small towns and villages

San Martin de los Andes, Argentina: City planners in San Martin had the smart sense to do what Bariloche never thought of: limit building height to two stories and mandate continuity in the town's Alpine architecture. The result? Bariloche is crass whereas San Martin is class, and the town is a year-round playground to boot. The cornucopia of hotels, restaurants, and shops that line the streets are built of stout, cinnamon-colored tree trunks or are Swiss-style, gingerbread confections that all seem right at home in San Martin's blessed, pastoral setting. Relax, swim, bike, ski, raft, hunt, or fish -- this small town has it all.

Cafayate Wine Town, Argentina: This small, sandy village in the Argentine Northwest is surrounded by multicolored mountain ranges and red rock desert. Vineyards punctuated by tall cactus sentinels stretch into the foothills. Home to the delicious white wine torrontes, Cafayate offers beautiful luxury wine lodges or more down-to-earth family-run hotels.

The Isla del Sol, Bolivia: There are actually several small villages on the Sun Island, but in total, only a few thousand people live here. There are no cars and barely any telephones. At rush hour, things get very chaotic: You may have to wait a few minutes while the locals herd their llamas from one end of the island to the other. Spend a day here, and you'll feel as if you have taken a trip back in time.

Porto de Galinhas, Brazil: This village of three streets in a sea of white sand is the perfect spot to learn to surf. You'll never get cold, while steamed crab and fresh tropical juices between waves do wonders to keep you going.

Morro de Sao Paulo, Brazil: Situated on a green lush island just a boat ride away from Salvador, this sleepy village offers some of the best laidback beach life on the northeast coast of Brazil. Car-free and stress-free, Morro de Sao Paulo offers the perfect mix of deserted beaches, watersports, and fun nightlife in an idyllic setting.

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile: Quaint, unhurried, and built of adobe brick, San Pedro de Atacama has drawn Santiaguinos and expatriates the world over to experience the mellow charm and New Age spirituality that waft through the dusty roads of this town. San Pedro hasn't grown much over the past 10 years -- it has simply reinvented itself. Its location in the driest desert in the world makes for starry skies and breathtaking views of the weird and wonderful land formations that are just a stone's throw away.

Pucon, Chile: Not only was Pucon bestowed with a stunning location at the skirt of a smoking volcano and the shore of a glittering lake, it's also Chile's self-proclaimed adventure capital, offering so many outdoor activities that you could keep busy for a week. But if your idea of a vacation is plopping yourself down on a beach, Pucon also has plenty of low-key activities, and that is the real attraction here. You'll find everything you want and need without forfeiting small-town charm (that is, if you don't come with the Jan-Feb megacrowds). Timber creates the downtown atmosphere, with plenty of wood-hewn restaurants, pubs, and crafts stores blending harmoniously with the forested surroundings.

Villa de Leyva, Colombia: You'd be hard pressed to find a place more picturesque than Villa de Leyva, one of the earliest towns founded by the Spanish. At 500 hundred years old, Villa de Leyva is nearly unspoiled by the ravishes of time. Offering green and white colonial-style churches, cobblestone plazas, delightful bed-and-breakfasts, a thriving arts community, and pristine countryside, it's no wonder Villa de Leyva has become the weekend getaway of choice for upscale Bogotanos. Villa de Leyva makes a great base for exploring the spectacular Boyaca countryside and participating in all sorts of adventure sports and eco-opportunities from repelling and kayaking, to nature walks through the nearby desert and waterfalls.

Otavalo, Ecuador: This small, indigenous town is famous for its artisans market. However, it also serves as a fabulous base for a wide range of adventures, activities, and side trips. Nearby attractions include Cuicocha Lake, Peguche Waterfall, Mojanda Lakes, and Condor Park.

Ollantaytambo, Peru: One of the principal villages of the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Ollanta (as the locals call it) is a spectacularly beautiful place along the Urubamba River; the gorge is lined by agricultural terraces, and snowcapped peaks rise in the distance. The ruins of a formidable temple-fortress overlook the old town, a perfect grid of streets built by the Incas, the only such layout remaining in Peru.

Colca Valley Villages, Peru: Chivay, on the edge of Colca Canyon, is the valley's main town, but it isn't much more than a laid-back market town with fantastic hot springs on its outskirts. Dotting the Colca Valley and its extraordinary agricultural terracing are 14 charming colonial villages dating to the 16th century, each marked by its handsomely decorated church. Yanque, Coporaque, Maca, and Lari are among the most attractive towns. Natives in the valley are descendants of the pre-Inca ethnic communities Collaguas and Cabanas, and they maintain the vibrant style of traditional dress, highlighted by fantastically embroidered and sequined hats.

Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay: Just a short ferry trip from Buenos Aires, Colonia is Uruguay's best example of colonial life. The old city contains brilliant examples of colonial wealth and many of Uruguay's oldest structures. Dating from the 17th century, this beautifully preserved Portuguese settlement makes a perfect day trip.

Merida, Venezuela: Nestled in a narrow valley between two immense spines of the great Andes Mountains, this lively college town is a great base for a wide range of adventure activities. Its narrow streets and colonial architecture also make it a great place to wander around and explore.